TITLE: Excalibur I
NAME: Joshua Humphries
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: joshua@dante.cwru.edu
WEBPAGE: http://dante.cwru.edu/~joshua/
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jhsword.jpg
ZIPFILE: jhsword.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Linux POV-Ray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    homegrown program & Adobe Photoshop 4.0

RENDER TIME: 
    05 16 59

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Pentium 150Mhz w/ 16MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The "sword in the stone" from Arthurian legends


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        I modelled the sword by hand (using graph paper and a calculator).
The height field was made in Photoshop using the "Clouds" and then
"Difference Clouds" filters to get the plasma, and then using semi-transparent
gradients to shape the plasma to fit in the scene properly. The trees were
attempt #4 or #5 at writing a program to generate them... As you can see
POV-Ray's builtin control directives were all I needed (and the results are
much better than my attempts at programs in C). All textures were created by
hand as well as were the parameters for the rainbow etc... (not like thats
much to brag about - just thought I'd share that I design a lot of this stuff
the old fashioned way :)
        Hey! Lay off the trees!!! They are not great but they are the best I
was able to get in several attempts. The search for a good model tree was
frustrating me to the point where I decided this solution was good enough...
        The knot emblem on the sword hilt was something I designed (you can
see how in the source to tube.c included in jhsword.zip) for the Glass topic
competition (several months back) but if you check you'll see I never made a
submission (never got far enough in my idea to render a scene for submission).
The knot does appear in an animation I've made. The animation (in FLI format)
used to be available at my web-page but any browser will tell you that my
page does not even exist anymore (it was on a friend of mine's machine and a
runaway uninstall script run as root made short work of his file system...).
        The title is "Excalibur I" because I hope to submit another one based
on the "lady of the lake" story... entitled "Excalibur II" no doubt :)