TITLE: The Bridge of Khazad-dum NAME: Raymond A. Salvatore COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: bonsalva@bellsouth.net WEBPAGE: none TOPIC: Fantasy COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: rasfanta.jpg RENDERER USED: Raydream Studio 5.5 raytracer TOOLS USED: Raydream Studio 5.5 and Micrografix Picture Publisher RENDER TIME: 25 minutes HARDWARE USED: PENTIUM III 128 MEG RAM - HP PAVILION AND HP CAMERA IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This was the last battle fought inside the mines of Moria, as described by J.R.R. Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Gandalf and Aragorn, along with the rest of the nine "walkers" had made it past most of the traps set by the orcs and had come down a different flight of stairs than the orcs had planned. The orcs had set a last obstacle of fire (ghash). But their plan failed and they ended up on the wrong side of the flames themselves. A balrog appeared from out of one of the tunnels and crossed the flames with no problem. The balrog was immune to fire, being made of fire himself. He followed the company across the bridge where Gandalf stood waitig to met him in combat. His friends could only watch from the other side of the chasm. Gandalf's sword shattered the balrog's sword into pieces. Gandalf used his staff to destroy the bridge under the balrog's feet. But as the balrog fell he swung his whip and caught Gandalf's legs and pulled the wizard down into the pit with him. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used the free form modeler to extrude the long pieces that made up the columns. The chamber doors are made from hollowed out spheres that are then cut up further via CCG intersection and difference. The balrog is mostly spheres, but his horns were made in the free form modeler and his head was made with supermesh using a height field that I drew from scratch in Picture Publisher. I used shades of grey to sculpt half of a face, then copied and pasted the reversed half on the other side to make a symetrical head. This was formed into a sphere via super mesh. Gandalf was made of cones that were sent to the mesh modeler and deformed by pulling and pushing vertices. There are eight light sources in the scene- more than I've ever used before. Most are just bulb lights tending towards blue or red. One is a spot light with grey light that's coming from outside the mine and illuminating Gandalf. I used the red lights to highlight the evil characters and blue to wash the hero. The light sources were limited to illumine local areas and fade out with distance.