TITLE: Excalibur
NAME: Josh Natzke
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: DrFrog711@aol.com
TOPIC: Fantasy & Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: merlin.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray v3.3

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The legendary sword Excalibur sits in a vine-covered stone in a mysterious lake
with mist and fog dissapearing into infinity.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

  Basically, I created the sword and the rest of the scene separately.
  For the sword, I used two cylinders and an extruded shape.  For the blade, I
simply did an extruded shape.  The textures used are those that came with
Moray, only I added a finish with 100% reflection to them.
  For the lake scene, I used three heightfields and two fogs.  The heightfields
were created using patterned fills that came with Polaroid PhotoMAX Pro 2.0. 
The texture for the stone is the Rough_Stone texture that came with Moray.  For
the vines, I simply modified the colors and scale of the "Electricity" texture
that came with Moray.  To create the vines, I simply copied the stone
heightfield and offset/scaled it an extremely small amount in the z-direction. 
The water was created using another heightfield created in PhotoMAX.  The
ocean_color texture that came with Moray was used.
  I then merged the scenes.  The fog was created with a grey constant fog and a
black ground fog.  I would have liked to have the sword sitting in a beam of
light, but I ended up using only an ambient light of dark grey to get the
illusion of the mist going on forever.