TITLE: The Castle of Saulxures
NAME: Sylvain Girard
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: zesly@wanadoo.fr
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sg_castl.jpg
ZIPFILE: sg_castl.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        POV-Ray 3.5 on Linux


TOOLS USED: 

        POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows
        SpilinEditor
        Micrografx Windows Draw (for iron-mongery height fields)
        Pov-Tree
        Photoshop 6 (for image_map enhancement)
        ACDSee 4 (WIP management and JPEG conversion)


RENDER TIME: 

        Time For Parse:    0 hours  2 minutes  44.0 seconds (164 seconds)
        Time For Trace:    6 hours 33 minutes  38.0 seconds (23615 seconds)
            Total Time:    6 hours 36 minutes  19.0 seconds (23779 seconds)


HARDWARE USED: 

        Athlon Thunderbird 800MHz, 640MO SDRAM133


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In the little town of Saulxures sur Moselotte in Les Vosges, east of France (Lat
: 47.125_N, Long : 6.767_E), there was a castle built between 1854 and 1861 by
a manufacturer of textile. It is a neo-classical style castle. Now it is in
ruin like the textile industry in east of France. It is invade by vegetation
and we can't see it anymore. It's a shame and that's why I had the idea to
rebuild it whith POV-Ray.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


For modeling the castle, I was helped by old postcards and a book about the
history of textile industry in Les Vosges. I did not model the sculptures on
top of the windows and the doors. The modeling is simple. There's nothing
special, just box, cylinder, sphere, prism. There is a lot of CSGs.

The bowls are lathes generated by spilineditor.

During a long time, I had no idea to model the iron-mongery and thought to not
model them. Then I discovered a simple drawing software programme on a CD
provide by a magazine called Micrografx Windows Draw. I used it to draw height
fields map for iron-mogery put on each side of the castle.

The grass is made by grass patches generated by the Gilles Tran's makegrass
macro (thanks !). I placed each patch on an image_map with  eval_pigment
available in functions.inc. The makegrass macro is not include in the zip file.
You can download it at Gilles's website : http://www.oyonale.com .

The trees are generated by pov-tree
(http://propro.iis.nsk.su/go/Wshop/tools/tools.html). The mesh files for the
trees are not include in the zip file because of their size but you can
generate it using the "pt_???.inc" files with pov-tree. The corresponding mesh
file must be named "???.inc".

The background hills are panoramic image maps made with photos I took around the
real castle's remains. There is two image maps put on boxes. One behind the
castle and the other for reflections in the windows (but it is not very
visible). The zip file don't include the original image maps but smaller
versions.

The sky is a media provided by Marc Jacquier (thanks !) and a little bit
enhanced by me.

The clouds are generated by the stacked sky find at
http://www.ignorancia.org/t_tips.php. It consist of 15 planes with wrinkles
texture. Only 15 planes to save rendering time. I tried media cloud but i
didn't get good results and it renders slower.

Well, I hope I didn't forget to explain other interresting details. I will
continue working on this scene and rendering other view of the castle.

This is my third scene which looks good and first participation to IRTC.

Excuse me for my bad english.