TITLE: Manifestation of a deity
NAME: Gail Shaw
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: gshaw@monotix.co.za
WEBPAGE: http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za/~gail/
TOPIC: Worship
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: manifest.jpg
ZIPFILE: manifest.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.6a

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhinocerous 1.1 Demo
             Poser 3
             uv mapper
             Pose2pov
            Paint Shop Pro 5 (Creating image maps and height fields, pasting
rendering 
             together and conversion to jpg )
             Gordian Knots (Celtic Knot creating program by Marc Schimmler)

RENDER TIME: 
    25 hours total (18 hours on the P3 450 and 17 hours on the P2 300)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 450Mhz 128 MB Ram, Pentium II 300Mhz 128MB Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Rethan held the goblet carefully. He had ony joined the priesthood of the god
of
war a few months earlier and this was the first time he had been allowed in
the sanctuary. He watched as the senior priest began the offering ritual. While
the snior priest prayed,Rethan glanced cautiously at the weapons around the
room
As a priest of the god of war he was expected to be able to fight competantly.
He
knew that weapon training would begin the next week. The senior priest finished
his prayers and Rethan stepped forward to make the offering. As he did so there
was
a flash of light and Rethan dropped to his knees in awe as the avatar of his
god,
a greatsword surrounded by flames, appeared over the altar.

"Rethan, attend me", a voice boomed out, "for I have need of thee"


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started by sketching the layout of the room then building it in pov making
sure
the dimensions were correct. The bricks are isosurfaces and use a random
texture
from an array. I then built the altar and the swords at the corners of the
altar. 
The same font is used on the swords and on the front of the altar, the
characters
on the swords are font objects while the wording on the front of the altar is a

height field created in PSP. I then created a collection of weapons, some of
which
are visible against the walls. The blades were modelled in Rhino, the rest of
the 
weapons are CSG. The human figures were modelled in poser 3 and converted to
pov
using uvmapper and pose2pov. The image maps were created in PSP. The loincloth
and
bracelet were modelled in Rhino. The relief on the wall and columns were created
using 
Gordian knot prog, rendered and used as height fields for the wall and
isosurface
pigment functions for the columns. The avatar is a modification of a sword I've
used 
before. The liquid on the floor is a height field. The rest of the image was a
result
of tweak, render, tweak, render. The pic was rendered in 4 parts on two
different machines 
as I left the rendering til the last minute as usual.