TITLE: Paused Skirmish
NAME: Paul Stansifer
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: paullusmagnus@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: skirmish.jpg
ZIPFILE: skirmish.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    MS-Paint (for image maps), Logitech Image Studio (for jpeg
compression)

RENDER TIME: 

  Image on screen: 4 hr 15 min 10 sec
  Main scene: 5 hr 14 min 29 sec

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 897 mHz, 128 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  While three troopers attack an airborne menace from the slight protection of
ruined corner of an old building, one of their comrades falls to an explosion
from a shell launched far away--

  The new owner of a raytraced real-time strategy game has paused the game to go
fetch another glass of orange juice.  One of the troopers onscreen, whose AI
script keeps running because of some unpatched bug, is surprised to see the
battlefield action stop.  Not knowing what to do, the trooper wanders about,
looking at the frozen battle from other angles.

A note on the interface:
  I attempted to create a sort of decentralized interface that might appear in a
heavily micromanaged game.  Each friendly unit has a vertical health indicator
and a set of flags on its selection circle that can be used to quickly give
individual orders.  Orders also probably can be given from a context menu
brought up by right-clicking (a la "The Sims").

  Information panels (like the minimap in the upper right corner of the screen)
can be shown or hidden so that the entire screen can be devoted to battle.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  The ground on the onscreen image is a heightfield, created from an agate
pattern.  The raggedness of the walls is also from a heightfield, as is the
snowdrift they accumulated.  The snow on top of it is a blob made with the
trace function.  The footprints from two of the troopers were placed by a
spline.

  The low-flying vehicle was made from six separate convex parts (excluding the
guns), to which I traced planes.  The intersections of these planes were put
together and given a reflective finish.

  The troopers are unions of cylinders and spheres, mostly.  I did the
positioning just by fiddling with the numbers in the vectors, which is actually
relatively easy.  If they remind you of LEGO minifigs, well, I intended for
them to look stumpy because their suits are probably pretty bulky.  The orders
flags are image maps.

  Onscreen items (the cursor, the text, and the minimap) were placed with the
screen.inc macros.
  
  The keyboard in the "real world" is CSG, with a macro to define the keys. The
text on the keys was created with the object pattern and text objects (all of
the non-text characters came from fonts).  It easily takes the majority of the
rendering time because of its complexity (each key is eighteen objects).

  Almost all the lighting in the main scene is radiosity (there are two light
sources, the monitor light and the Num Lock light, but they contribute very
little to the lighting of the scene).  The monitor image is an image map on a
section of a sphere with a high ambient value.

  Gamma correction was a mess-- at the default gamma value, the scene was too
bright and had patchy light.  Unfortunately, this probably means that the scene
looks weird on monitors that have significantly different gamma values than
mine.

  The papers lying around are the Common Application (for college admissions),
copied from a pdf file, and the cables are sphere sweeps.