TITLE: elqueen
NAME: George Papaioannou
EMAIL: gpig@hol.gr
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: elqueen.jpg
ZIPFILE: elqueen.zip
RENDERER USED: povray 3.0beta for DOS
TOOLS USED: Photoshop 3.0, Blob Sculptor 2.0a, 3DSTUDIO r3, 3ds2pov
RENDER TIME: about 13hrs
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-150 / 16MB ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

"The Flight of the Elephant Queen".
Who said elephants can't fly ( Especially when they're pink ! ) ?

Of  course  this  is  supposed  to be a fantasy world apparently inhabited
only by nice, round, fluffy, pink elephants. As you can make out from  the
tusks, the most of them are males and are supposed to be the royal guard !


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Elephants:
I  created  the  body  of  the  elephants  with Blob Sculptor. Then, using
3DStudio, I made the mesh of one ear which I converted to a POVRAY include
file afterwards. Tusks and eyes were created with povray. You can see that
the position of the ears  differs  from  elephant  to  elephant. This  was
achieved with a #while directive where I used the modulo function in order
to cycle through the 3 possible positions of the ears.

Clouds:
Instead of using the trivial planar or spherical sky, I thought  it  would
be  better  if  I  could  create  a whirlpool kind of effect. So, I opened
Photoshop  and  made a whirlpool map which I used to create a height field.
The "cloud" object is semi-transparent so that light  from  above  is  not
obstructed.

Hills:
All  hills  are  height  fields  of course. The maps were drawn by hand in
Photoshop. It is a small detail of course, but you can also see  a  couple
of  waterfalls  at  the  far  end  of  the  scene, about the center. Water
consists of cylinders and toruses.

Trees:
The  tree  object  is  the  only  object  that  is  not  original. It is a
conversion  of the pinecon2.3ds file I found in the "AVALON 3D objects and
resources" CD. Anyway, that  doesn't matter because it  is  not  the  main
subject  of  the  image.  Its  purpose  is only  to enhance the detail and
credibility of the image. The arrangement  of  the  trees  is  done  using
multiple  #while  statements. Each one #while represented a helix function
with a little randomness.

Elephants' positions:
A  descending  helix  function with a sine modulation was used in order to
create the path the elephants should follow. I  didn't  use  a  randomizer
in order for  the  positions to remain always the same in every rendering.
The  ears  follow  the  same  path,  but  there  is  a  #switch  directive
determining which position of the ear object should be placed at each step
of  the  iteration.  The path consists of more than one #while statements.
Care has been taken as  for  the  path  segments  to  succeed  each  other
smoothly.

Castle:
Nothing  special,  apart  from  the  rock  bellow it which is an upturned
height field.

Cliff:
The rock at the very foreground is a height field too  ( what  else )  but
this  time  it  is placed horizontally because I needed a very sharp angle
at the edge, more than 90 degrees that a normal height field could offer.

Effects:
As you may have observed, there are numerous light  shafts  emerging  from
the  clouds, like  the sun beams do. This effect was the result of the use
of atmosphere ( with Rayleigh scattering ). It took me a  huge  amount  of
time  to  set  all  the  parameters  and  the 3 different layers of fog so
that I could get the right look.
I also used focal blurring in this to make it more convincing.


This  time  I  decided  to put in a zip file some of my work on the scene.
What is not included is the textures file I  have  created  for  use  with
many other scenes as well.