EMAIL: lazara5@msn.com NAME: Adrian Lazar TOPIC: Old Technology COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Landship COUNTRY: Romania WEBPAGE: - RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g (Unofficial version, recompiled for PIII/Athlon by Stephen Schmitt) TOOLS USED: Moray 3.3, sPatch, Gimp and Paint for textures, IrfanView for conversion to JPEG RENDER TIME: 36 minutes HARDWARE USED: P4 2.4GHz, 512 MB DDR266 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Aarrrggghhh! Shiver me timbers! Ain't you gonna finish patching'er up? We shoulda' been burning the roads already! I must've been crazy to get onto this here bucket o' rust whith a bunch of leaky pipes and a pair of oversized kettles, but I tell ya it's worth every darn penny! We don't need none of them fancy 'self-loading cannons', that's fer sure! Everyone will hear about the 'Leviathan' and scurry away in fear! " "... Advances in steam engine technology then made possible the development of steam-povered armored fighting vehicles. Soon after the end of the war people realised that the landships were ideally suited for transportation. In less than a decade landship-based transport became one of the most profitable businesses. And, not unlike their maritime-based cousins, such wealth ended up attracting all kinds of people. Meanwhile, with the development of the self-loading cannon, the Navy suddenly found themselves in possession of a very large stock of outdated ordnance. Obviously, some of it found its way to black market arms dealers. And so, a group of dubious individuals got their hands on state of the art military equipment. Installed aboard crudely-armored ex-civilian landships or even decomissioned military vehicles, these weapons proved deadly in the hands of ruthless pirates. These fast and well-armed ironclads quickly became the scourge of the old Imperial roads. The Dark Age of the Corsairs had begun ..." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well, here it is: my third entry to the IRTC. Coincidentally I had just finished reading Michael Moorcock's "The Land Leviatan" when I spotted the new IRTC topic and I knew what I wanted to model. The objects in the scene are mostly CSG. The steam engines are partly recycled from an older project. Also, the rusty armor plates are slightly modified versions of the ones used in my first IRTC submission ("Ghost Ship", "Water" topic). The crew is a mix of free meshes taken off the Net (especially for faces), Bezier patches and some SPatch meshes. The smoke is a union of spheres placed by hand, with an absorbtion media applied to them. I also experimented with the smoke plugin but I wasn't satisfied with the result and, with time running out, I had to settle for this more conventional approach. I'm actually quite happy with the result, although I wish I had a little more time to tinker with the placement (but then, don't we all?). The barrels are slightly modified versions of the one from Moray's Object Library. If you happen to remember my first entry, you'll probably recognize the flag. It still uses the same texture (Yeah, Paint still finds some uses and Wingdings has some really neat characters :) ). As for the environment, the trees are created with the help of Keith Hull's tree plugin. The grass and the road are a single multilayered object, the grass being an image map with a transparent strip down the middle for the road to show through. The pond is a heightfield generated in Gimp and the water is a dark blue material with a ripple normal and some refractive media applied to it. Permission is hereby granted, without written agreement and without license or royalty fees, to use, copy, modify and distribute any of the included objects for any purpose, including commercial applications. P.S. The Gear plugin included in the .zip is developed by me and is to be considered an alpha version. Use at your own risk. When I consider it finished I'll probably upload it to Moray's Plugin Library along with the source code. Until then you may use it as you see fit, but be advised that the compatibility with this version is not guaranteed.