TITLE: The Gatekeeper NAME: Christoph Hormann COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: chris_hormann@gmx.de WEBPAGE: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/ TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: chgate.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Photoshop for jpeg conversion HCR-Edit for gamma correction XEmacs/Internal WinPov-Editor for coding ClothRay: http://tofbouf.free.fr/clothray/index_en.html Gilles Tran's maketree and makegrass macro: http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm checkpat.inc: formerly http://www.koganet.ne.jp/~sylow/pov/utility.htm current availability unknown. IsoCSG library: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/pov/ic/ RENDER TIME: 17.3 days HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1 GHz, 512 Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A traveler on a flying carpet on its way through a craggy landscape towards a castle of alien look. The 'gatekeeper' is guarding a passage through the mountains. Concerning the topic "Spectacular Landscapes", i think something becomes 'spectacular' only by human judgment - nothing in nature is spectacular per se. So adding some human influence and presence to the landscape seems only natural to me. A structure in nature seemingly resembling a human figure also is a central motive of human appreciation of nature, just think of how human forms are recognized in the moon, on the mars surface, in star constellations and elsewhere and are a main source of mystery tales throughout history. The flying carpet is an old symbol from the stories of "Thousand and One Nights" (or "Arabian Nights"), a collection of tales from the Arabic and Persian regions. Some links concerning this: http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze33gpz/flcarpet.html http://www.mfa.gov.tr/grupc/cj/cja/d1305.htm http://www.al-bab.com/arab/literature/nights.htm http://www.bartleby.com/16/ http://www.bartleby.com/65/n-/N-1001Nigh.html DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The terrain structure including the gatekeeper figure is modeled with isosurfaces. The gatekeeper's main form is created with blob components using the IsoCSG library. The carpet is created with isosurfaces too, both the main form as well as the fringes. Its texture is completely procedural. The umbrella is created with a macro i wrote and which i will probably make available on my website when i have cleaned up the code. It is textured with the 'checkpat.inc' include file, the used cloth structure normal resulted in some ugly moire pattern because i could not afford higher quality antialiasing settings for the whole scene and rendering only that part with better settings would be against the rules. The human figure is just several cloth patches draped over a blob skeleton with Clothray. The castle is classical CSG. The grass, bushes and trees are made with makegrass/maketree. The scene was rendered with full radiosity pretrace down to 2x2 and 'always_sample off' + raised error_bound during final trace. None the less there were still a lot of samples taken during final trace.