TITLE: Dungeons & Dragons verses an arcade airforce NAME: Leroy Whetstone COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: lrwii@joplin.com TOPIC: fantisy mistic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: dd_vrs.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1g Windows TOOLS USED: jpeg covertion: Lview by Leonardov Haddad Loureiro Triangle mesh: David Sharp polygon & prizm: by me RENDER TIME: Parse: 23 sec. Trace: 1 hour 28 min. 48 sec. HARDWARE USED: Amd K6 500Mhz 128 Meg RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Three of my best friends where killed in this place so I decided to destroy it" said Captian Arcade. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my eight entry. When I first read the subject the only thing that stuck in my mine was 'Think about dungeons and dragons...' I never got 'into' it. I had some friends that where but we could never get togather to play. The one time I played the game was so boring that at the end of the evening I killed my chareture off. My first thought was to convay that idea by have a string of castels all looking alike stretching out to infinity. I did that and it was boring. It needed something, I just wanted to blow it up. So, I did. I really had fun too! I've played a few computer adventure games.(Zelda and the like) They are mostly what I call "Search and Destroy" (find the key or what ever, kill the bad guys) Thats what I did here, after I placed the castles and a few of the planes I searched for things to either blow up or drop or to change. I use the POV FILE functions to place objects with the RAND function in files and then went back and edit the files to get the look I wanted. SCENE : size: 800 * 600 antialias: Method 2 Thershold .5 Depth 2 Jitter 1 frame level objects: 9558 Objects: Lights: 2 White place far above the ground Sky: one that came with POV Fog: I used 2 fogs one almost black and one white. both have fog_type 2, distance 50, fog_alt 3, turbulence 2 one has fog_offset .5, the other has fog_offset .75 When I frist started I played around with the fog and water until I got some thing I liked. water: Hand made texure on a box with an IOR of 1.33 Castels & forground land : The Castels, I started with an old castel I'd made. Then I made 8 different prims for cutouts and 10 different rubble piles. I use the RAND to place the rubble and cutout values in a file. The ground under each castle is a prism (intersected with a box to give the grass effect) and a height field. When I place a castel and the ground under it, I rotated randomly both independently. Men: All 83 men where place by hand. There are 50 different poses. They are made of simple union of cylinders and a sphere. I made a POV program to ramdomly move the arms, legs, head and body and display 100 of them and choose the best out of that 100 and put their data in a file. I did that around 10 times before I had the 50 I wanted. Even at that I had to modify, drop and create a few new men. I thought about writing a Qbasic program that would help but the time it'll take was better spent on other things. Now that I'm through with this picture I'll write something. Smoke: I first started with a union of 3 spheres one inside the other each with a different texture for each. I Randomly place the spheres inside a cone without the cone showing and the spheres scale to the height of it location in the cone. I made 8 differnt smoke objects this way. I place them randomly around the castels and saved their data in the same file as the Castels data. I use this smoke to edit the file. later when most of the other object where set I decide to try to improve this smoke. I tried to use media by itself in clear spheres . I tried using BLOBs. I tried different combination (of the above). I fianally settled on using one sphere as a base randomly place as before but using merge, media and putting a pigment over the whole thing. Dragons: Are another old project off mine. All had to do was scale and place them. The dragons by the wall are older and wiser. I like to think of the dragon up front as a baby just wanting to play.(That's why I didn't blow him up.) Airplanes: All 17 where made from modifying a plane in Triangles by Davis Sharp.There are 240 smooth triangles. All where place by hand. Boats: made using one polygon per boat with black pigment. Zip-File: Sorry abount not having a zip file. I tried, but I have 8 POV files, 8 PRIZM files, 3 TXT files and 3 INC files mostly scatted in different directories. When I gather them up in a directory to make a zip file I stopped when the size reach 454k and I wasn't even half done. I don't like to give a ZIP files that's only has part of what is need to do the scene. When I first started with POV I downloaded some that where and I never got over IT. Epilogue: I really like doing this. I know I've said it before, but I really did. When I place the men each had there own little story. If you look carefully you may see 6 men caring away three of POV treasures.(colored RED, Green, Blue) And when I place the planes I could all most feel the G-forces and trying to figure their target. I let my imagination run free. It was better than watching a movie or reading a book. I also learned a little. While working on this at one point I had 65,000 frame level objects and a render time of 2.5 hours.I just had the castles and smoke done and a few planes placed then. Using MERGE for the smoke cut frame level objects in half and also reduce the render time. The only trouble I had was with the JPEG convertion. I still hate it. I am never able to get my JPEGs looking the way I want. So if you see any artifacts you know what cause them. Feel free to E-mail me with any comments and or suggests.