TITLE: Death of a Mage
NAME: Nathan O'Brien
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: no13@ozemail.com.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~no13
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 13magic.jpg
ZIPFILE: 13magic.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Autocad & customised LSP routines
           Poser2
           Rino 3D
           Spatch
           Texture Magic
           Colour Mixer 2
           Winblobs
           Paintshop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hours 19 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 133 with 64Mb ram, Nt4 OS

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


One of the things EVERY Mage knows is that when you summon a demon you must not
cross the line
of the pentangle that confines the evil beast. This one forgot and is now facing
the 
consequences. DEATH !! The image is of the last second of the Mages life. Silly
sod. Serves him
right for summoning demons. Or maybe he was trying to invoke one of the IRTC
admins ? :-)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The entire scene was planned and drafted in Autocad. The candles and pentangle
were then created
using some custonised LSP routines. The drips to the candles were added later.
The drips were 
made using winblobs and then modified by hand to add some cylindrical blobs.

The columns were created by hand as was the pillar of fire. A cylindrical halo
was used for this
and translated, scaled etc for effect.

The figures of the demon and mage were first created in Poser2. They were then
imported into 
Rino for modification. The demon was modified only slightly and then exported to
pov. The mage
was split into several parts and exported seperately so that the jacket and
pants could be given
different textures. Hair and additional clothing was also modelled in Rino and
added to the mage.
A face image_map was created in paintshop pro and applied to the mages face. You
can see the
eyes and eyebrows if you look closely. Getting this image_map to the right
coordinates and
rotation took at LOT of test renders.

The spell book was created in Spatch with the visible page being an image_map
created in paintshop
pro. It was then scaled, rotated and translated into position.

All textures were created using Texture Magic with modification by hand for
effect. 

The lens flare effects were created using Chris Colefax's Lens flare INC file.

After all the modelling and test renders the lighting levels were adjusted along
with the ambient
setting of some finish statements.

Not all of the code is included in the zip file (it just got too big, all of 7Mb
worth!) but
the informative hand written parts are included. I've left out the mesh files.