TITLE: The Duel
NAME: Ben Chambers
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bdc79@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Fantasy - Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bcfm.jpg
ZIPFILE: bcfm.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 0.7

RENDER TIME: 
    9 Hours 26 minutes 55 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Duron 850 w/320megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Two invisible (well, slightly :) beings are dueling on a bridge.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I used multiple settings in my main pov file to set the detail levels.  All
objects were stored in include files.

The robots are unions of blobs, cylinders and spheres.  I set up a number of
variables for positioning and such, and then created the robots based on these.
 I used an object hierarchy so that the hands would follow the arms, etc. 
Originally I made them completely transparent, with a large specular highlight,
but I found they were not "visible" enough :)  So, I gave them an IOR and
increased the transmit value to greater than one (increasing the amount of
light passed through them).

The swords use media for the color, and a 1-dimensional area light for the glow
they give off.

The walkway is a union of cylinders, and the hanging cables are actually sphere
sweeps.  For positions, I used the hyperbolic trig funtions to get a realistic
hang.

The land is a heightfield, generated by wall.pov.  The texture gave me trouble,
and I eventually settled on a version of brown.

The "lightning" (or whatever) is a series of torii on an axis from the green
guy's hand to the middle of the red guy's sword.  I used two density patterns
for the media, both of them crackle, but with different scales, turbulences and
colors (one white and the other blue).

The water was originally an isosurface, but later replaced with a heightfield
generated by the file water.pov, for speed considerations.  It uses a small
amount of reflection, as well as absorbing media.  It's texture has gone
through considerable changes, originally being more clear, but the current
color made it look too much like mud.  So, I decreased the amount of light that
came through it.

Lighting was also quite an experience here, being revised drastically. 
Originally a night-time scene, with a full moon over the horizon over the red
guy, I later changed it to a sunset with the sun setting over Mr Green.  The
change in position of the sun was to improve the highlights on the water and
grass, and so now the sun is not visible, being high overhead.

Which brings me to the grass...  I modelled (by hand) a small half-blade, which
I converted to a triangle mesh through a utility I wrote.  This was reversed
and union'd to give a full blade.  I have two settings for the grass in my main
pov file, 2 will (more or less) randomly position all the blades and save their
locations to a file, and 1 will simply include that file (it takes 5-20 minutes
to place all the blades, depending on how many are desired, but only 20 seconds
to include the final (7 megabyte) file).  The blades are placed by traversing a
grid area, jittering the location of the points about so they do not appear too
orderly, and using trace to determine if the land was above the water at that
point.  If so, a blade was placed on top of the land.  The texture for the
grass is a simple green with a good (imo) highlight, and about 50% transparency
(I found that no transparency made the grass too... harsh? hard?  I don't
really know how to describe it, but I like it better this way).

And, of course, I used my favorite aspect ratio: 16x9 :)
If you have any comments, questions or anything else, I'd be happy to hear from
you.

...Chambers