TITLE: Sword and the Stone
NAME: Brendan Heilke
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: contrath@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com./CapeCanaveral/Lab/1614/index.html
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bahmagic.jpg
ZIPFILE: bahmagic.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.01 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Povpad, Terrain Maker

RENDER TIME: 
    3h 6m 14s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 200, 32 meg RAM (+16 virtual), ATI 3D card (2 meg
video RAM)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        First thing I thought of when I heard the topic was Magic, was the
mickey mouse on a cliff with water splashing up and stars shooting from the
sky. But I didn't do that, so I did the sword in the stone scene instead. I
think I was watching Monty Python's Holy Grail when I thought of it, when King
Arthur was explaining to the peasant why he was king. (Help Help I'm being
repressed! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! You saw him
repressing me, didn't you?) But alas, I failed to model a "watery tart".
             I would have liked to put a dragon and a castle in the picture, but
i went on vacation for a couple weeks and didn't get the chance to finish
either.
        Hope you enjoy it anyway!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        I did the sword out of a bunch of triangles with a tube cutout for the
bloodgroove (I didn't get quite the effect that I wanted). The islands the the
background and the foreground were made out of height_fields and the trees I
made in lparser (I lost the sorce code for them though). I only got half of the
dragon completed, so I didn't bother integrating it.
        At first, the reflections off the sword were very dull (purple actually,
like the sky... hmm, I wonder why :P) so I put a plane behind the camera with a
cloud texture to make the sword stand out more. I wish I could have done more
work on the sword (like some sort of celtic style bumpmap on the handle and
gold decorations on the flat base of the blade), but like I said, I went on
vacation.