TITLE: Lost City
NAME: Marc Schimmler
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: schimmler@ica.uni-stuttgart.de
WEBPAGE: ---
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lostcity.jpg
ZIPFILE: lostcity.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    x-povray v.302

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch (thanx to Mike Clifton), gimp v1.0 (conversion tga - jpg,
            height fields), HFlab from John Beale

RENDER TIME: 
    5 h 31 m 46 s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 90 (48 MB RAM, linux)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


From the diary of LtCol. J.Simms:

12th of December 1919

Today I resumed the search for the tomb of Alexander the Great. Mild Breeze,
cloudy sky. I started at 0919 from our small airfield in Al-Hamid and headed
on course 164 into the desert. The Fokker Dr I still runs like the reliable
machine it always has been. I looked out for any signs that could lead to the
tomb at height of about 120 ft above the ground.

At 1037 I saw some interesting dark stones about 1 1/2 miles away in a smooth
valley. I changed my course an headed in that direction. You can't believe how
excited I've been when I saw that these stones where indeed the remains of
pillars which where freed from the sand by the desert winds. When I circled
around this site I saw the head of a female statue between the pillars
... definitely not from egyptian origin!!!

I had found it!

-----------------------------------

This fictional story tells what my entry shows. The center of this scene is
Fokker Dr I Triplane. I really liked this plane and decided to build a scene
around it. My first idea was a scene where the plane fly through the man made
valleys of a skyscraper town. The idea was fine but the scene did not come
close to anything imagined it to be. So around chrismas I threw it away just
taking the plane. 

What now?


I played around with a heightfield and after a few tests I had a very
convincing desert scene. 

How does this fit into the given topic???

Archeology ... the discovering of the remains of an ancient city. A lost
city. Here it is!



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The plane has been mad with sPatch, also the pilot. The landscape is a
heightfield created with hf-lab and modified with gimp. The texture is fully
procedural. The head of the statue is another heightfield and the pillars are
simple cylinders "cripled" by random boxes at the end to give them a weathered
look. Everything was arranged by hand using the old trial and error method.