TITLE: "Zeltar-7 Technical School"
NAME: Paul T. Dawson
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
EMAIL: ptdawson@voicenet.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.voicenet.com/~ptdawson
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: zeltar-7.jpg
ZIPFILE: zeltar-7.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray(tm) for Windows Version 3.01.borland.win32

TOOLS USED: 
    DOS Edit, PhotoFinish, Coffee

RENDER TIME: 
    2 Hours 44 Minutes 24 Seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD 486-120 with 20 megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A school for creatures on another planet!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


For this round, I had three design goals:
    1. Have fun.
    2. Use a few carefully chosen colors.
    3. Make up a completely imaginary planet / scene.

The idea for the little, um, creatures, came from the photos of
the so-called "Face on Mars". Since those fellows needed bodies
to travel around, I gave them some little rolling trash cans (?),
with sine wave arms. Then I built some elevated roadways for them
to roll around on.

The school started out as a box, then I added "tiles" made from a
hand drawn height_field. The antennas on the roof are made with my
nested loop tree file. The fence around the school has spiral things
made from triangles (they are JPG blurred to near invisibility).

The roadways also have lots of triangles. Unfortunately, the system
I used to position the sections caused fatal errors in DOS POV-Ray.
A quick switch to the excellent Windows version solved that problem.
Please do NOT try to run this file with POV for DOS - it won't work!

The planet "floor" and the surrounding mountains are done with several
height_fields. One height_field is a TGA, created by POV. I included
the source file (not the TGA) for that one in the ZIP. The other
height_fields and image_maps are hand drawn (all included in the ZIP).

There are over TWO MILLION triangles in the scene! 8-) It uses about
12 megabytes of POV memory.

There is one little technical detail worth mentioning. In the source,
there are the usual "Scene Switches" at the top, to turn individual
objects on and off. I added a "fake" setting for some objects, which
gives a simple shape, like a box or cone, instead of the real, "final"
object. This speeds up parsing and tracing, during scene testing.

Oh, it's called "Zeltar-7" just to be last on the alphabetical list!?!

Thanks for reading all this,
    Paul T. Dawson
    April 30, 1997