TITLE: Nickel Tour NAME: Bill Bobzien COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: codegrynder@yahoo.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/codegrynder TOPIC: Ruins COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: bb_ruins.jpg RENDERER USED: Bryce 4 TOOLS USED: Poser 4, Paint Shop Pro 5 RENDER TIME: 1 hour 1 minute HARDWARE USED: P166, 96 Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Natsuko Yoshimitsu, a researcher at Site 3 on Russell's Stake, points out some key features of the mysterious ruins, abandoned long ago by an unknown race, to a newly-arrived colleague, Carson Dako. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The ruins and the hill they surround are all terrain objects with various materials applied. The research station structures and the cargo lighter are Boolean (CSG) objects, while the cargo itself is a group of cube objects. The roadway is a cube with stone and terrain objects differenced out of it. The figures are from Poser; Carson's data tablet is a cube with an image map applied for the transparency setting. (The figures are named for the Poser characters on which they are based, with last names taken from some novels I read recently.) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to Lester, whose "rusted decay" Deep Texture Editor tutorial (http://www.deeptextures.demon.co.uk) provided the starting-off point for the ruins textures, and to Peter Sharpe, whose tutorials were also a big help (especially the "broken glass" technique, which I adapted for the roadway.) Thanks to the IRTC Admins for running this great contest, and to my fellow raytracers, for constantly challenging me to do better. Thanks also to my parents (love the software, guys!) and, last but by all means not least, to my wife, Julie, for putting up with this strange obsession I picked up long ago with an idle visit to povray.org.