TITLE: excalibar myth of epic proportions NAME: s.jefferies EMAIL: terraform@upnaway.com TOPIC: epic proportions COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: excaliba.jpg RENDERER USED: povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: povtree and runes grass tex RENDER TIME: 2 hrs 48 mins parse 28 secs HARDWARE USED: celeron 2.2g 256mb ram (laptop) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: From the ends of the rainbow and the myst`s of time rises the legend of arthur`s sword excalibar. Swords feature in all types of religions and can be traced back to days when every thing seemed of grande stature. The back drop of waterfalls reminds us of the most epic of all things Nature. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All the cliff faces are image mapped height feilds made with photo`s I took of real rocks. The Plants growing on the walls are also mapped height fields of real plants taken from above at night using flash photography to simultae the correct shadows more realisticly. The sword is a seperate include file i made using CSG and the runes are text icons.The handle is made up of torus`s around a tang (which you cant see). The water in the lake is actually 4 layers of diffrent IOR set about .1 apart. this water reflects light really well but in this render most of the reflected light is directed back towards the waterfalls not the camera so its not as noticable. the water falls are boxs with textured normals and IOR and reflection settings . This flatess helps create the illusion of height. The reeds are made using runes grasstex inc. and the bolders in the water are hand placed to get them right. The trees around the cliffs are made in povtree and were tweaked to look good from all angles and look wind swept on the cliff. I also wanted to reduced the parse time by getting the tree just right so that i could rotate the same tree and make it look diffrent enough. so only one mesh used for the parse the use of focal blur at .5 and standard setting but focused on the sword (foreground) helps blend it all together the fog is two ground fog layers in white and blue and a media statment in a dark grey but with emission on to get it looking lighter. this adds whisps around the base of the falls. the raindow is a transparent pov rainbow. No post proccess image changes ie contrast cropping etc. was done saved bmp then converted to lower quality jpg. aprox 4:1 reduction in resolution.