EMAIL: thomas_gaukel@t-online.de NAME: Thomas Gaukel TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Unicorn in the Evening COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: http://home.t-online.de/homes/thomas_gaukel (starting about mid - September 2001) RENDERER USED: UniMegaPOVPlus 0.5a mod 0.2.5 on RH6.1 Linux TOOLS USED: UltraEdit, Poser, 3DWin4, Photoshop RENDER TIME: 22.5 h HARDWARE USED: Dual P233MMX ( one processor rendering, one for searching the WEB for tips ;-) ) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A few weeks back I wanted to do some pictures for our fantasy roleplaying group, and since I did some Sci-Fi stuff with Povray a few years back I went to check out the new Version. I also found Poser 3 on a compilation CD, and a few days later I managed a pretty nice Horse. When I checked back on povray.org and found out the new IRTC topic was "Fantasy and Mystic" I decided to go for it. In our RPG we're in the middle of a campaign which in involves the search for an ancient elfen culture and I was in the mood to do somthing mystical. So after a few days of trying this and that I finaly came up with a young elf who is just making camp for the night, when she get's an unexpected visitor...... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The island in the background and the hills are heightfields made and tweaked with a number of tools, including HF-Lab and the demo-version of Leveller. The grass and the little bushels of higher grass are free models from http://www.3dplants.com/, placed with loops and mirrored randomly. The meshes of the elf, the unicorn and the horse are exportet from poser, textured with own textures and imagemaps. I played a lot with UVmapper, but I'm not quite shure if the meshed I finaly used where modified with it. I wrote a little PERL - script to create the tails of the horse and the unicorn out of 500 single hairs, each made out of approx. 30 cones. The unicorn horn is a blob, three spheres rotated and translated along an axis. The trees in the foreground are splinetrees made with the macro written by Andrew Clinton (http://povplace.addr.com/). I had to modify some oft the finishes, because the trees tended to "glow" in the dark. All this stuff was kind of hard on my memory, so i had to plug in a borrowed extra 2 gig hd as swapspace. I placed the trees in the background with the Genesis Toolkit (http://wwww.rhein-ruhr.de/~schrammel/genesis.html). The trees themselves are include in the Vegetation Package from the same site. As are the ferns visible on the right side of the image. Other stuff like the "picnic", the stones, the weapons and the bedding were handcoded. I tried to model a bow in Moray, but ended up using a sine courve prism instead. The thing between the water bowl and the orange is a flute, in case you wonder ;-) A sky sphere with 3 gradients and a partly transparent plane with 2 textures make up the sky. Three lightsources in the scene : the sun, the campfire and the spell the elf is casting. The spell is an area light. The sun was an area ligth also, but after I coulnd't see much difference to a point ligth (other than the render time) I left that out. The spell on the other hand had casted very nasty sharp shadows as a point lightsource. There are a couple of "firsts" in this image. It was the first time I used heigthfields and the first time I used blobs. It was also the first time I used media. (Damn, it tool soooo long to get a hang on "halo" a few years back). But from what i have seen media realy seems to be more flexible. I had planed to add a little more stuff to the camp, but time ran out. ;-( I've included everything in the source-file except the Horse, Unicorn and Elf. They can be downloaded from my soon to be website in a couple of weeks. I guess about mid-september (2001). Thomas