TITLE: Looking round the ruins NAME: Peter Murray COUNTRY: England EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ TOPIC: Ruins COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pdmruinc.jpg ZIPFILE: pdmruinc.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC TOOLS USED: Deskdraw for sketching out layouts "Old English Villages" by Perry, Gore & Fleming (0-297-79144-3) "National Trust Book of British Castles" by Johnson "Castles" Fax-Pax (1-873147-12-0) RENDER TIME: About 50 minutes (I forget to check!) HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Three people visit the old ruined castle DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I've decided, as a challenge, to try using one basic setting for all my IRTC entries in the year 2000. I don't know if I'll be able to do that, but for now I'm working on an English village. Having decided that, I sketched out a village layout using photos from the above reference works, and wrote some macro files to manipulate an array of landscape heights. Using the database meant that a macro can look up the height at any point in the landscape, which I've always found difficult with heightfields. Then I built the castle (see castle.jpg in the zipfile) and then built a "damage object" which was removed from the castle using difference{}. The "render test dummy" macro I wrote about a year ago was improved to allow it to be posed and costumed, and I put three people into the scene. There are other things, such as a church and some roads, which were put into the scene before I'd decided on the final camera angle. When I came to do the final rendering, I discovered that for some reason the difference{} seems to have left sections of the castle wall hollow :-( . Previously, difference seems always to have repaired the cut surface - there must be something obvious I've overlooked in the scene. At one point, I was considering trying to render this as a sepia-toned image instead of normal colours - many of the textures still include a macro to allow me to easily switch that on and off. The include files that set the height values across the landscape have been left out because they're so large. One of the macros will create flat landscape blocks anyway.