TITLE: The Sacrificial Lamb NAME: Stephen M. Farrell COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com WEBPAGE: n/a TOPIC: Worship COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: sacrfice.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.1 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.1; Paint Shop Pro 6.02 (signature and image compression only) RENDER TIME: Approx. 19 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 266; 128 mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The gods demand a lot from their followers sometimes.... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: For a while now I've wanted to try making a human figure for use as the centerpiece of a scene, but knew it would prove very difficult to do using only POV-Ray. Still, once the idea of doing a human sacrifice got stuck in my head, I thought I might as well try it. I feel I did a decent job of it, at least. (While I'm aware that the human figures are far from perfect, I did get them to look better than I thought I could.) The figures are mainly blob objects, although I did use basic CSG for the eyelids and eyeballs. The blobs consist of many spherical components, which I positioned and repositioned over and over again by trial and error until I thought my brain was going to explode (which would have made me a human sacrifice to the POV gods, I suppose). About seventy percent of the time spent on this scene was spent tweaking the figures. They could still benefit from some additional tweaking (the baby's ear in particular bothers me a lot), but I had to draw the line somewhere. The background is also a single blob object, consisting of about two dozen cylindrical components. I wasn't particularly worried about realism here... I wanted something free-form and rather odd-looking as a background, and I guess you could say I got exactly what I was going for here... it looks decidedly odd to me. The medallion is simple CSG, with each of the chain links placed by hand. The handle of the knife is a lathe object, and the blade is CSG. For the tattoo on the man's upper left arm, I took the original blob arm, scaled it up slightly, and then intersected it with a CSG design, and used a partially transparent pigment to get it to blend into the skin the way a real tattoo does. I intended to go back later and come up with a more complex design for the tattoo (and for the medallion, for that matter), but simply didn't have the time available. The altar consists of two prisms... the top part uses a linear_sweep and linear_spline to create the rough edges and cracks, while the bottom part uses a conic_sweep and cubic_spline to create its shape. The candlesticks are lathe objects, and the candles themselves are CSG, with a simple blob object used for the dripping wax. The diagram on the floor is supposed to look as if it was drawn by hand with a mixture of chalk and blood. The shape is simple CSG, and I used a clear and red gradient texture on each part with a small amount of turbulence to give the edges some raggedness. I tried this time to use the camera angle and lighting to help develop the scene. I wanted the bodies to be an interesting mix of light and shadows, so I made the candlelight the main lighting for the scene. I ended up having to use area lights for all of the lights in the scene, to soften the shadows cast on the figures, which I think accounts for the high render time (high for me at least). The camera angle was chosen to emphasize the man's upturned face, which I hope helps support the topic of worship. (With the man's upturned face, and the positioning of his hands, if you took the knife out of the scene, he could easily be praying over the child.) That's about it for this scene, I guess. As always, constructive comments and criticisms are definitely appreciated! Good luck to everyone, and see you next round.