TITLE: Skendaw NAME: Edward Shaw COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: hes3@lycos.com TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: skendaw.jpg RENDERER USED: trueSpace 4.2 TOOLS USED: trueSpace 4.2, Photoshop 5.5, Poser 4, Bryce 4 RENDER TIME: 3 hours 23 minutes HARDWARE USED: 400 Mhz Pentium Desktop w/512 MB mem SCSI hardrive Viper V550 Video Card w/16 MB mem IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Mission: 1216.028/4902.39.4 - 1220.161 Purpose: Domain Expansion - Status Update/New Contact Location: Ven Sector/Sarkel Binary(Local: Glauzede, Brizede)/Planet 5 (Local: Drek)/3902.2097 First Contact: Mission 0461.030/2218.05.2 - 0477.372 Image: 1433 Description: The massive belgeddium gates of Skendaw swing shut and the portcullis drops behind a pair of Tevenkan Model 4 Light Guncruisers as they lumber out into the gathering dusk of another long Drekkian night, on their way to relieve the watch and assume patrol duties along the Fa-Kowd/Stauch frontier. The Fa-Kowds, architects of Skendaw, trace their genesis to the remnants of a colony established on Drek in 5152.031 (Old Reckoning) by the failed Hellung Empire. Abandoned and forgotten, they were, remarkably, able to survive Drek's harsh planetary conditions and the relentless attacks of Stauch, but only by becoming themselves harsh and relentless. The Verxid Chronicles identify first established contact with the Fa-Kowds as 0477.372. Presented with the requirements for inclusion in the Domain, among them being (as almost any school student could recite) that "all associations extant among sentients on a given planet be carried out in a state of peaceful coexistence and harmonious interaction," the Fa-Kowd Glaumendik (High Council) declared themselves forced to decline. They gave as reason that with which those socio-economic experts who have since made study of the situation generally concur: that as long as the Fa-Kowds and Stauch cohabit Drek, there can never be the smallest clump of undisputed Drekkian soil. Skendaw and various other similar installations stand in stark witness to the enmity that persists between the two, even to this writing. The Chronicles relate in detail five separate attempts made by the Verxid to establish meaningful contact with Stauch. They record none of any success. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I used Poser for a few models (yeah, ya might hafta look for 'em), Photoshop to create some custom textures, and that's a Bryce sky. Everything else - modeling, lighting, final rendering, you-name-it - was done in trueSpace. Pretty standard stuff. A word about the render might be in order: this image was not raytraced - my machine choked when I tried to render in that mode, even after I had dumped a lot of unseen geometry. I instead resorted to a trueSpace4 lighting option called Ray Casting, which provides for accurate shadows even in a Scanline render. The two lights from the right use Ray Cast shadows, while the backlighting from the left uses shadow mapping, this because I wanted only those surfaces in view of it to be illuminated by it and at the same time wanted (very) soft edges to what shadows it might create. No magic here, but then, it doesn't seem that much of magic would likely be found anywhere on Drek.