TITLE: Shangri-La NAME: Bob Franke COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: bfranke2@home.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/bob_franke/pov/pov.htm TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION JPGFILE: shangila.jpg ZIPFILE: shangila.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g for Windows 95/98/NT TOOLS USED: Keith Rule's Wcvt2pov Jaime VivesPiqueres Cloud Macro MilkShape 3D by Mete Ciragan John P. Beale's Height Field Lab AccuTrans 3D by MicroMouse Productions Lview Pro for jpeg conversion and copyright note. POV-Ray editor RENDER TIME: 38hr 27min HARDWARE USED: generic Pentium-III w/ 256 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: First of all, it's a fantasy, so nothing really has to make any sense. This is an image of a small society at the top of the world, in a Shangri-La like setting. At the base of the pyramid there is a group of people preparing to worship their god whose image is cast in stone on the mountain. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: John P. Beale's HF-Lab was used to create the height field. I used MilkShape to create the houses, people and the pyramid. The trees, weeds and Yoda are models from the 3-D Caf_. To save memory, AccuTrans 3D, WCVT2POV and MilkShape were used to convert all the objects to meshes. I wrote a program to locate the objects, more than 51,000, on the height field. The program, inspired by the Genesis Tool Kit, can place multiple objects and has a function to not place objects on steep slopes. When I finish it, I will make the program available for download on my POV web site. I used Jaime Vives Piqueres simple "stacked planes of clouds" trick to create the sky. Media was used for the smoke at the top of the pyramid. Ground fog was added to give depth to the image. The landscape in the background is a tiled randomly rotated height field. To save space, I have included only the "inc" file for placing the houses around the lake. Well, that's about it. Good luck to all.