TITLE: Moria's decline
NAME: Robert Lee
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD
JPGFILE: balin.jpg
ZIPFILE: balin.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    IFranView, Little Gray Cells


RENDER TIME: 
    about 10 hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    2.4 Ghz Pentium on Windows 2000


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Moria in decay.

"It looks like a tomb."  

"They have taken the bridge and second hall...
We cannot get out.  We can not get out. The
end comes... drums, drums in the deep... They
are coming"

"There are older and fouler things than Orcs
in the deep places of the world."



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The picture was rendered with +w1024 +h768.  To 
reduce jaggies, +aa 0.3 was used.
  
Most of the shapes are isosurfaces with a max
gradient that is less than recommended to
make the stone crack.  Stone textures, combined 
with a stain texture and bumps are applied to the 
isosurfaces to create the rocks.

I created dwarfish runes from "Fellowship of the
Ring" and inlaid them into the stone along the
top of the far wall.  The inscription found on
Balin's tomb are inscribed in the top of the 
tomb; but, when I lowered the camera angle for a
more dramatic view, the inscription could no longer
be seen.  Elevate the camera angle and look down
on the top of the tomb and rerender to see the 
inscription.

The light beam was created by filling a hollow,
invisible box with scattering media and then
shining a light down from above through the media.

I played around with different combinations
lighting and radiosity before settling on the
image presented here.  In the end, the second
radiosity setting, RadQuality = 2, was selected.  
The radiosity file was generated by setting 
the pretrace option to 0. The render was 
stopped when the final image began to be 
computed.  The pretrace option was set to 1 
and the final render was made. 

The scene is lit with 5 lights.  A red light 
suggests that a Balrog is near.  A strong light
shines through the media box from above.  An
area light lights the back wall from the right of 
the camera.  A second area light is left of
the camera and lights the entrance way.  An
area spotlight shines down from above to light
the floor, and a bit of the lower walls.

A cobweb macro was written to connect semi-
transparent cylinders to each other to fill a
3D space.  Under certain lighting conditions, 
the cobwebs look acceptable. 

I created the scene with conditional switches
so different parts of the scene could be rendered
with simple or complex textures, simple or 
complex lighting, etc.  This technique helped to
speed up development.  I left the conditional
statements in the code so others can see how
this is done.

Code for the runes, pillars, and entrance way
were stored in separate include files.  There was
no need to use high media samples, High_MSamples
set to 0, because the image looked the same with
or without the high sampling rate.   

IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.