TITLE: Unicorn in the Evening

NAME: Thomas Gaukel
COUNTRY: Germany

EMAIL: thomas_gaukel@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: http://home.t-online.de/homes/thomas_gaukel         (starting about mid - September 2001)


TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: unic_elf.jpg
ZIPFILE: unic_elf.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    UniMegaPOVPlus 0.5a mod 0.2.5 on RH6.1 Linux


TOOLS USED: 
    UltraEdit, Poser, 3DWin4, Photoshop


RENDER TIME: 
    22.5 h


HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual P233MMX ( one processor rendering, one for searching
                              the WEB for tips ;-) )
                              

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A few weeks back I wanted to do some pictures for our fantasy roleplaying 
group, and since I did some Sci-Fi stuff with Povray a few years back I 
went to check out the new Version. I also found Poser 3 on a compilation 
CD, and a few days later I managed a pretty nice Horse. When I checked back
on povray.org and found out the new IRTC topic was "Fantasy and Mystic" I 
decided to go for it.
In our RPG we're in the middle of a campaign which in involves the search 
for an ancient elfen culture and I was in the mood to do somthing mystical.
So after a few days of trying this and that I finaly came up with a young
elf who is just making camp for the night, when she get's an unexpected 
visitor......



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The island in the background and the hills are heightfields made and tweaked
with a number of tools, including HF-Lab and the demo-version of Leveller.

The grass and the little bushels of higher grass are free models from 
http://www.3dplants.com/, placed with loops and mirrored randomly.

The meshes of the elf, the unicorn and the horse are exportet from poser, 
textured with own textures and imagemaps. I played a lot with UVmapper, but 
I'm not quite shure if the meshed I finaly used where modified with it.
I wrote a little PERL - script to create the tails of the horse and the
unicorn out of 500 single hairs, each made out of approx. 30 cones.
The unicorn horn is a blob, three spheres rotated and translated along 
an axis. 

The trees in the foreground are splinetrees made with the macro written by
Andrew Clinton (http://povplace.addr.com/). I had to modify some oft the 
finishes, because the trees tended to "glow" in the dark.

All this stuff was kind of hard on my memory, so i had to plug in
a borrowed extra 2 gig hd as swapspace. 

I placed the trees in the background with the Genesis Toolkit 
(http://wwww.rhein-ruhr.de/~schrammel/genesis.html). The trees themselves
are include in the Vegetation Package from the same site. As are the ferns
visible on the right side of the image.

Other stuff like the "picnic", the stones, the weapons and the bedding 
were handcoded. I tried to model a bow in Moray, but ended up using a sine 
courve prism instead. The thing between the water bowl and the orange is a 
flute, in case you wonder ;-)

A sky sphere with 3 gradients and a partly transparent plane with 2 textures
make up the sky.

Three lightsources in the scene : the sun, the campfire and the spell the elf
is
casting. The spell is an area light. The sun was an area ligth also, but
after I coulnd't see much difference to a point ligth (other than the render
time)
I left that out. The spell on the other hand had casted very nasty sharp shadows
as
a point lightsource.

There are a couple of "firsts" in this image. It was the first time I used 
heigthfields and the first time I used blobs.

It was also the first time I used media. (Damn, it tool soooo long to get a hang

on "halo" a few years back). But from what i have seen media realy seems to be 
more flexible.

I had planed to add a little more stuff to the camp, but time ran out. ;-(

I've included everything in the source-file except the Horse, Unicorn and Elf. 
They can be downloaded from my soon to be website in a
couple of weeks. I guess about mid-september (2001).

Thomas