TITLE: 1914-1918

NAME: Ian Shumsky
COUNTRY: UK

EMAIL: ianshumsky@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.outerarm.demon.co.uk/graphics/graphics.html

TOPIC: Horror
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 19141918.jpg
ZIPFILE: 19141918.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1e watcom


TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro for heightfield creation and copyright text
            Photoshop for JPEG conversion


RENDER TIME: 
    Time for Parse 0 hours 20 minutes 36 seconds (1236 seconds)
             Time for Trace: 27 hours 23 minutes 25 seconds (98605 seconds)
                 Total Time: 27 hours 44 minutes  1 second  (99841 seconds)


HARDWARE USED: 
    PII Laptop, 128 Meg, running NT4



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


When the 'Horror' topic was announced, I was reading Martin Gilbert's history
of the first world war (ISBN: 0006376665). I was so shocked and horrified at
the scale of the loss of life in the war that I knew instantly what my image
would reflect.

In the end I decided to produce a scene showing one of the many cemeteries
where the dead from both world wars are buried. The final image is based on
an image on the Commonwealth War Grave Commission web site
(http://www.cwgc.org/). That image is included in the zip.

Thanks to Glenn McCarter for kindly allowing me to use his rose model from his
'The Drama of Cinema' IRTC entry.

As usual, there are many things I would like to tweak, given the time. The
first would be to add inscriptions to the headstones. Second, replacing the
rose with a poppy would be a little more appropriate. Other minor alterations
would be to improve the lighting, soil colouring and headstone texture.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Starting from the top...

Sky: The sky was based on Jaime Vives Piqueres' sky ideas first seen in his
Canyon image. Instead of his single cloud layer, I created three layers at
various heights, with different textures to try and create different cloud
effects.

Trees: The trees were produced from Laurens Lapre's LParser.

Headstones: The headstones are CSG objects which are created, textured and
placed by a macro. There is a significant artefact when performing the CSG
operation to remove the cross which I can't seem to fathom... I think I can
feel a question to the IRTC mailing list coming on.

Rose: As already mentioned, the rose model was created by Glenn McCarter and
is used with his permission. See his text file for his 'The Drama of Cinema'
IRTC entry for a description of how it was created.

Soil: The soil is created from 2 heightfields, with the second a mirror image
of the first. 10 of each type and joined together and textured to form each
strip and then placed in the scene.

Grass: The grass is based on a macro created by Giles Tran. There are 2
different types of patch which are randomly rotated and placed so that
patches are only placed where they can be seen. Each patch of grass contains
625 individual blades of grass... helps explain the large object count for the
scene (279748). Each blade of grass is a mesh object.