TITLE: Gathering of the Elements NAME: Alexander Lang McClung COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: bbtwc@geocities.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/4078 TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: almpent.jpg ZIPFILE: almpent.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.0, ThumbsPlus (for file conversion) and LView Pro for adding the text RENDER TIME: 1 day, 7 hours, 8 minutes 41 seconds HARDWARE USED: PentiumII(MMX)/400 with 64mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The idea was sparked from a very general suggestion given to me by a friend of mine, about how the pentacle was related to alchemy and elements and such. So that grew into what you see now. On the floor of the room sits the pentacle atop a wooden floor. Within the pentacle's five points sit the four elements (Earth, fire, wind, air), and the in the fifth point is the Universe, where all four elements combine. At the end of each point sits a candle, each representing an element. Green for Earth, Red for Fire, Blue for Water, and White for Air. In the background, two doors open out into the universe. The doors are adorned with symbols of the Sun and Moon, representing the celestial bodies. Above the pentacle is a chandelier (sp?), there's nothing special about it. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS MADE: I took a relatively simple approach to creating each of the objects in the scene: I first started off with the pentacle, seeing as how to do it popped into my head almost immediately. Each point is a prism cut-out by another prism, translated and then rotated (pretty simple). After a little contemplation I decided that the room was to be cylindrical, which is also very simple, just one cylinder hollowed out by another (see? I told you it was simple). For the elements, several techniques were used. Water was the simplest, just a prism and a nice looking texture. Earth was just a simple height-field, and another nice looking texture. Fire was a combination of a height field (the coals) and a halo (the flames). Wind? You guessed it, a height field and a halo. (None of this was very difficult). The floor was to come next. In stead of making it a boring, cold, floor, I decided to make one out of wooden planks. That was simple, too, but it didn't look right (to me). I then decided to add a bit of randomness to each plank, rotate them and move them around a little bit (see the source code for more details). That was probably the most complicated object in the whole scene. Next I decided to go back to the pentacle and make some candles. Basically, I modified Chris Young's "candles.inc" file to suit my needs (I didn't think his was very flexible). The drips of wax is your basic blob object. Next came the doors. Again, instead of making the doors one stupid box, I made it up of several wooden planks (although that's not very apparent in the scene, but I tell the truth!), and fastened together with a metal band (that's very apparent). "That was easy," I said to myself, "but it's too plain." So Idecided it would be a neat idea to put a sun on one door and a moon on the other. The sun was relatively simple. I first started with a sphere, and the points I had used for the pentacle (only they were much smaller on the sun, and much more solid). But that didn't look right, so, using "bend.inc", I made them all wiggly (for lack of a better word). Much better. Then I slapped a handle on it and moved on to the moon. The basic moon shape is one cylinder cut-out by a smaller one. That looked flat so I decided to "puff it out" by intersecting that with a sphere, which did the trick. But that wasn't enough for me, I had to do a star. No problem, I took those same points (smaller and more solid, again), and made them into a star shape. I also puffed that out, too. Excellent. I slapped on another handle and I was done. The chandelier was very, very simple. Just a bit tedious. Lots of spheres, torii, and differences of cylinders and torii (to get those tapering sections - see the code again). A glance at the code will explain much better than I can here with simple words. The galaxy background was made with Chris Colefax's "galaxy.inc" file. I also used his "nkflare.inc" to create the lens flare. Now I was ready to begin texturing. The stone walls in the background is a modified "T_Stone25" (I think) from "textures.inc", and I combined a few of the wood textures from "woods.inc" (I can't remember their names anymore, unfortunately). The rest of the textures (the chaldelier, the pentacle texture, and the textures on all the elments) are all made by me. And that's all there is to it!