TITLE: Dragons Nest
NAME: Mick Hazelgrove
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: mhaze@minda.swinternet.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.minda.swinternet.co.uk/index.htm
TOPIC: Imaginary worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dragnst.jpg
ZIPFILE: dragnst.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov Ray 3.1 superpatch

TOOLS USED: 
    Corelpaint 8 to make the heightfield, image maps and bump maps.
Organica to make the bodies and legs of the baby dragons. 3Dwin was used for
all conversions

RENDER TIME: 
    approx 3hours 30 mins

HARDWARE USED: 
    300mhz Pentium 2 with 128mb ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When anybody says imaginary worlds or fantasy worlds I immediately think of
dragons - so this picture had to be about dragons. At first I tried to express
the grandeur, magic and power of dragons and after 3 weeks hard work ...put a
pic together to discover it didn't work!  With time running out a rapid rethink
was called for. I decided to take the opposite view and show the loving side of
dragons, for their young that is!!!
So a dragons nest it is with mother watching over the birth of here hatchlings
and Dad watching anxiously from the sidelines.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The rocks making up the nest are height fields created in Corel Paint.
The yellow energy field is an effect created with media, that I discovered 
recently, using ramp waves and frequency. The red energy field was created in
the same way but is much thinner.
The red heat under the eggs is also media.
The eggs are created in two ways, one by using clipped spheres scaled
differently and the other is a simple ellipse. The clipped version would not
allow itself to be differenced to create the broken shell!! So I had to use
ellipses for them. The idea of a conical sweep to create the broken shells
comes from Giles Tran and was adapted to suit.
The dragons are of two kinds the adults and all the wings are csg contructions.
The bicubic patches in the wings were coded by hand. These were part of an
unfinished project I ressurected for this entry
The baby dragons were created in Organica converted to dxf and then to Pov using
3Dwin.

The mesh files are not included in the zip file due to their huge size - over 20
Mb! but should anybody want or need them, I'll try and send them.