TITLE: Knight's day off NAME: John Haiducek COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: jhaiducek@tm.net WEBPAGE: n/a TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING JPGFILE: monster.jpg ZIPFILE: monster.zip RENDERER USED: MegaPOV 0.5a TOOLS USED: -GIMP for Windows (it's surprisingly stable, contrary to developer's reports) -Hamapatch -Blob Man People by Peter Houston -MakeGrass macro by Gilles Tran -Lightning Include File by Jeffry Brickley and Bob Hughes RENDER TIME: 2d 09h 52m 05s HARDWARE USED: Pentium MMX 166 Mhz, 32 MB RAM, Windows 98 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It's the knight's day off, and the wizard is filling in. The smoky smell of smoldering grass mingles with a faint smell of ozone as the fire-breathing monster encounters fire of a different kind. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I mulled over the idea of dragons, considering even the possibility of a pterodactyl-shaped dragon (so it wouldn't look to fat to fly), but I ended up with a monster instead. The dragon is modelled in Hamapatch, and the texture is a slope-dependent texture-map. The eyes (barely visible) are based on the BlobMan include files. The wizard is created using Peter Houston's Blob Man People include file. The wizard's Costume Definition File is based on the sample file "croft.cdf". The lightning was created using the Lightning Include File by Jeffry Brickley and Bob Hughes. The include makes some really nice looking lightning, but it's difficult to work with when you want the lightning to strike at an angle from a specific source. I had to do a lot of trial and error before the lightning was coming right from the wizard's hands. The village houses in the background are CSG. I looked at some photos of old European farmhouses and attempted to duplicate their essential features. They have thatch roofs made with Gilles Tran's MakeGrass macro (that turned out to be unnecessary since they're so far in the background, but the thatch is there anyway.) The burning barn is identical to the houses, except that the thatch roof is gone, the plaster wall texture is replaced with the ash texture I used for the ground, pigment-mapped so the wall appears nearly burned away. The fire is a spherical media. The ground plane is textured with some grass textures I made a year ago, modified appropriately. On top of the grass texture there are nine other layers, for the patches of burning grass, the ashes, and some scratches in the dirt under the dragon's feet. The field in the background was created with the MakeGrass macro. Also the clumps of weeds on the ground were created with blades from the MakeGrass macro, arranged in circles, and distributed on the ground with a version of the MakePrarie macro that I modified to randomly adjust the position of the clumps of weeds.