TITLE: Aariel's Sword
NAME: Zebulon F. Wisard
COUNTRY: Switzerland
EMAIL: zebu@pingou.linux-site.net
WEBPAGE: http://pingou.linux-site.net/zebu/
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: aarsword.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    The Gimp, hf-lab, vi

RENDER TIME: 
    ~64h

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6-2 300 MHz 256Mo RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

 "I know I shouldn't have gone this far into the deep recesses of the Mountain
of Doom.
 The tribe's Elder always used to say 'Aariel, stop wandering in those creepy
caves,
 that's not the proper behaviour for a young elven minstrel like you'.
 Every night I used to dream about the magical Sword of Power which was said to
have been
 buried by the Dunedains eons ago. Now that I've made my way through the muddy
tunnels and
 found the main cave, I know that I'll meet my fate very soon. The sword is
glooming
 in front of me, but I feel an evil presence around. Something is awfully
wrong,
 all my senses tell me. The bones my feet have crushed under these dirty waters
must have
 been the remains of the previous adventurers, some of them certainly much
stronger and braver
 than me, powerful warriors of a dead age... I think I'm going to grab this
floating weapon.
 Maybe this fright will vanish when I'll hold it..."
 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Well, this is my first 3d scene (spheres on a checkered plane  & basic
landscapes using heightfields 
don't count...). A basic heightfield was created under hf-lab and then enhanced
with the Gimp.
The engraving on the blade is a CSG-difference of a Gimp-produced heightfield
(actually it's my name...)

Due to lack of time (I started working on it 2 weeks ago, but that's around 60
hours of work), it's far from
complete. The scene should have been much darker, the fog was meant to have
ghostly shapes (playing with
high turbulence, the halo around the sword more like a chaotic shape, the water
and the stalagmites/tites
 more realistic... bones and armour remains should have been designed, as well
as "evil green gloomy eyes"
 (as a matter of fact, there are eyes lurking from under the water surface, but
you can't see them...)

No modellers were used, even if I consider using Blender for the next entry...
and by the way I hope the result
will be much better. 

Sources and images (heightfields) will soon be available on my web page. If
you're impatient, you can ask
me to send the to you through e-mail (or any other convenient way)