TITLE: Follow That Luggage! NAME: Sonya Roberts COUNTRY: CanadaWEB PAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Soho/Lofts/1022 EMAIL: Sonya_Roberts@geocities.com TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright. JPGFILE: discwrld.jpg ZIPFILE: discwrld.zip RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.02 watcom.Win32 Pentium Optimised TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop 3.0 to add file info and convert to JPG, and for creation of image and material maps. Texture Magic 0.95 for creation of some of the textures. "books", "pyr_cube", and "hairycyl" plugins. RENDER TIME: 1 day, 5 hours, 51 minutes, and 21 seconds (okay, it could have taken a lot less time, but I used radiosity, even though it didn't make all that big a difference in this scene...) HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 w/64 meg memory and Matrox Millenium 2mg Graphics Card IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It's another event-filled day on the Discworld. The Library at Unseen University, home to wizardry, is witness to yet another world-threatening adventure. The Luggage, that well-known travel accessory of sapient pearwood, accurately described as "one part trunk, four parts homicidal maniac" is on the rampage once again. No one is quite sure just what set it off, but that demonic escapee from the Dungeon Dimensions that's scuttling for cover might have something to do with it. Chasing after The Luggage is it's owner, the Discworld's worst wizard, Rinceward, wearing the standard wizard's uniform of robe and pointy hat. Not having much in the way in seniority (none, in fact), he has not decorated his apparel with the usual jackdaw's collection of gold lace, Ankh-stones, and vermine, but has instead contented himself with embroidering "wizzard" on his hat in silver thread. His old friend and sometimes travelling companion, Cohen the Barbarian, octagenarian hero, is also chasing after the Luggage. Cohen's the only person known to have survived a fight with the Luggage, having once wrestled it into submission long enough to pry it open in an effort to determine what it does with all the people and other objects it swallows. He found nothing in it but some dirty laundry, but that's another story. The Librarian, who was turned into an Orangutang by a freak thaumatergical accident several years ago, is looking on in astonishment. He's resisted all efforts to turn him back into a human, as he finds the climbing ability and extra hands useful in a library where, due to the high background levels of magic, shelves exist in more dimensions than three and books lead a private and sometime vicious life of their own. He also likes how all the big questions in life have resolved down to where his next banana is coming from. While his attention is elsewhere, some of the University's ants are making off with the sugar cubes from his tea. The high levels of magic have mutated many things around the University, including the ants, who are presently engaged in building a sugar-cube pyramid in which to entomb one of their queens. While a team of ants lowers one cube to the floor, more are rolling another cube away along a path of rollers. Taking advantage of the confusion, one of the Libraries more reknowned grimoires, "The Books of Going Forth Around Elevenish" (written by a lazy llamanistic sect) is making a break for freedom. The Death of Rats, passing by one his way to an appointment in the kitchens with some strychnine-laced bran and a colony of rodents, watches the action in bemusement. EXPLANATION OF IMAGE: There's a series of books by Terry Pratchett about a magical world called the Discworld. It's carried through space on the backs of four elephants perched on the shell of Great A'Tuin, a giant turtle. This scene shows some of the more well-known and frequently-appearing characters from the books, arranged in a scene that does not, to the best of my knowledge, appear in any of them, though it is comprised of elements that have appeared in these books. Such as the ants stealing the sugar, the Luggage being on the rampage, and Things from the Dungeon Dimensions breaking through into reality. The exception is the seal on the wall behind the Librarian. This is based on a stamp that Mr. Pratchett was using on books at a book-signing I went to, and is actually the bookplate of Death..."Ex Libris Mortis - Hic Estvita Vester". I know the first line means, roughly, "From the Library of Death", but if anyone could enlighten me as to what "Hic Estvita Vester" means I'd be grateful. If you are not already familiar with these books, I highly recommend them...they are "typical British science fiction and fantasy" if you consider Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, and Red Dwarf to be typical examples. Ie., funny and filled with strange things and amusing characters and events. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This was the first image where I've used blobs to any degree. I've dabbled with them in the past, but never really done all that much with them. I found them to be really useful for creating organic shapes, espcially given the way that POV can blend pigment colours from blob component to blob component. Rincewind, Cohen, the Librarian, the Death of Rats, the escapee from the Dungeon Dimensions, and several parts of the Luggage, are all made from blobs. The Rincewind's hair and eyebrows, Cohen's beard and eyebrows, and the Librarian's furry head and shoulders, are all done by distributing curved hairs made of linked cylinders, using #while and #rand. The easiest distribution is problably the beard and eyebrows (simple rectacgular arrays) while the most complex was the hair on the orangutang's shoulders, which not only gets sparser towards the neck, but curves along the shoulders and hangs down towards the front and back. The method does use quite a lot of objects (each hair is 5 cylinders joined end-to-end, except for eyebrows which are only 3), but the results are good. The Library itself is created by several #while loops that create the shelving and the relevant books (the books are done using a preexisting plugin I created for another scene some time ago). The ceiling and one side wall are mirrored surfaces, to make the room seem bigger than it actually is and show the other library on the ceiling, something alluded to in several of the Discworld books. The scene also uses a lot of image maps and material maps, for the various signs, the lettering on Rincewind's hat, the lettering on the seal, the pattern on the mug and plate, and the windows. Everything else is just standard CSGs of regular primitives.