TITLE: The Wardrobe
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: wardrobe.jpg
ZIPFILE: wardrobe.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 beta 11



TOOLS USED: 


        POV-Ray editor
        Paint Shop Pro 5&6



RENDER TIME: 


        5 days 9 hours
         ouch.



HARDWARE USED: 


        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The wardrobe from the children's story "The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe".

This rather unremarkable piece of furniture is the gateway to the magical world
of Narnia.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I was stuck for an idea for this round. I did my usual brainstorming session but
came up rather empty. Eventually this idea occured to me and I decided I had to
go for it because it seemed such a novel and original take on the topic (since
then I've learned that at least one other person has had the same idea! Doh!).

It's a bit of a change from my usual style, which meant this image has been
quite a learning process. Normally I go for exploiting the capabilities of
POV's procedural textures and objects, but in this scene the centre piece is a
recognisable man-made object so I had to follow more conventional modelling
strategy.

The wardrobe itself is just CSG; a few rounded boxes with some clever use of
cylinders to carve the top. The detail on the door is a height field, hand
drawn in Paint Shop Pro, to give the impression of mundane tacky decoration
(which is how I feel a magical wardrobe should look).

The sprayed snow is more my usual style: a paricle system fired at the area
around the back of the wardrobe. I realised after the final render that I
should have killed particles that land on vertical surfaces, you'll note the
two blobs hanging onto the edge of the gateway to narnia, but I couldn't afford
the time for another render before the deadline (my computer is tied up
rendering another image for this round: "Links").

The snowy ground is an isosurface formed from a few sine waves. The footprints
are a heightfield, drawn in PSP, cut out of the ground objects. There's a
couple of radiosity artefacts causing strange shadows on the snow, which is
annoying because they weren't there when I used lower quality rad settings.

The nearest 2 trees are a strange lumpy cone shaped isosurface, with a texture
that matches the function and helps add artificial shadows. All the other trees
are just normal cones, because at that distance with the focal blur you can't
tell the difference :) BTW, the bit of the image which has the trees in it took
about 4 days to render! The rest of the image took far less time (luckily).

Oh and finally I'd just like to mention one of my favourite touches in this
scene: Narnia and the outside world have completely different lighting. This
was acheived by seperating the two with an infinite plane. The two suns sit
either side of the plane, so I didn't have to mess around with light groups or
anything. I then textured the sky_sphere so that it was split along the plane
between a nice sunny day (for the real world) and a more wintery feel (in
narnia), and made the plane perfectly reflective, so that the radiosity behaves
as if each world had it's own complete sky sphere. :)