TITLE: The cloud NAME: Micha Riser COUNTRY: Switzerland EMAIL: mriser@datacomm.ch WEBPAGE: http://micha.virtualave.net TOPIC: unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: palace.jpg ZIPFILE: palace.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.1 for LINUX, pvmpov 3.1 TOOLS USED: text editor, Gilles Tran's maketree include file RENDER TIME: some days HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350, Pentium II 300, Pentium 166MMX IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Somewhere high in the air there is a place you would not believe it could exist: An outlandish palace standing on a cloud, even trees are growing out of the clouds. This place floating through the air flying over our heads is a place of peace and quiet. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Everything is handcoded POV-Ray source code, everything done myself except the two trees. The scene is dominated by two basic shapes: - The first is the bonnet of gold. It is the function 1+Sin(x) rotated around the x-axis. This shape formes the roof of the main palace, the windows and the doors, as well as the top of the walls and the fire bowls. - The second shape is a tower which consists at its bottom of a square and at its top of a circle; in between there is a smooth morphing between these two shapes. All the towers and the columns are formed by this shape. When I began creating this picture the first thing was to form these two shapes. Afterwards I made a macro which forms the surrounding walls and places its ornaments at the top. Then I began with the main building, the palace. I added thing for thing and cut out the windows. I spent some ours making the writing around the entry gate - which you can't read in the final version. Then I made the clouds: This was quite annoying to me because it was my first trial with POV's "medias". I spent much time to find suitable parameters for the turbulence modifiers. I also had to realize that medias are very slow. The combination of many light sources, many objects and medias became finally a reasonable problem. When I first started the final rendering I calulated that it would take about 1000 hours for the picture to finish rendering. So I had to interrupt it and to look for a way to speed up rendering. I finally solved this problem by adding some more boundings, decreasing the number of light sources, and lowering the quality settings with the medias. I would have liked to add some more clouds in the background, but this showed impossible because this would have increased the rendering time even more.