TITLE: Babylon NAME: Douglas Eichenberg COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: douge@nls.net WEBPAGE: www.getinfo.net/douge TOPIC: Mystery COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: babylon.jpg RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 TOOLS USED: Poser, NuGraf/PolyTrans, PoseRay, UVMapperPro, Picture Publisher, Rhino, LightSys, PCM.mcr, LnsEfcts.inc RENDER TIME: 2 days 12 hours HARDWARE USED: P4 ~1.5GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I don't think anyone will understand how this image relates to the topic unless I give some explanation (I know I wouldn't anyway). In the book of Revelation, John, one of the apostles, is visited by an angel, who shows him a vision of the end of the world and the judgement of mankind (actually a common theme in most religions). The story in the book of Revelation is told in a very ambiguous manner... a lot like the writings of Nostradamus. At one point, the angel takes John to see "a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls... and on her forehead a name was written: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." This one passage, from chapter 17, has probably seen more varied interpretations than any other in the bible. Despite the fact that the angel goes on to "explain" the mystery, the reader is left just as baffled about what it might mean (if one believes it has any meaning at all). At any rate, my image is a pictorial representation of this supposed prophetic mystery. The central female figure in the image represents the women being described in the passage. I made her larger than any of the other figures because she is described as invoking awe. I gave her multiple arms partly because that gives the impression of something extra-human (like the paintings of Hindu deities), and partly because she is described as being representative of many different nations (actually a city that reigns over all other cities) . The gems are in red, black, and white... red for blood, black for evil, and white for good. The banner above the woman's head is the verse quoted above: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." Took me a little while to find the actual Hebrew translation for it, but I think I got it fairly close. There's a little trick there that I played with the text... some of it is hidden from view behind the curls in the banner, so if you only translate what you see it says "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, MOTHER EARTH." The coins and gems piled at her feet represent earthly wealth, something that gets mentioned many times throughout the book. I experimented with a 7-headed dragon in the image, since the "scarlet beast" is often described that way in the bible, but it was simply too impractical... it would have dominated the image. Instead, I have the woman sitting on a scarlet throne with animal-like scarlet-colored wings. The throne extends behind her into an elaborate construction of bones and skulls... representative of the mortal men and women that will supposedly side with the beast and die in the final batttle against God. If you examine the background you will find the seven heads and ten horns of the beast, which represent seven and ten kings (the passages are somewhat contradictory here... the heads represent kings in one verse, and mountains in another). Arrayed in a semi-circle at the front of the woman are the seven angels (only six are shown, one is actually the viewer). Each of the angels holds a golden bowl, described as being the wrath of God. As each angel pours out their respective bowl, some new horror confronts man (oceans turned to blood, plagues, war, fun stuff like that). When the final bowl is emptied, the lucky few still alive get to witness the worst earthquake ever, followed by a storm of giant hail stones. At any rate, the angels in the image hold their bowls at the ready, and look skyward, waiting for the order. I have shown them standing on lotuses since that is usually symbolic of "purity." The woman has her hands in the air as if acknowledging the cast and crowd at the end of a show, and she wears a sort of forlorn look on her face. The stage curtains can be seen above her. I'll leave the interpretation up to you. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: BANNER: Modelled in Rhino by extruding a thin rectangular surface along a 3D polyline curve. The texture and bump map were hand-painted in Picture Publisher. The Hebrew TTF font I found on the internet. I distorted the text after placing it on the image map to make it look more like ink by bleeding some of the edges with a watercolor brush, blur filter, and displacement brush. I also went around the edges with a darkening brush to give it an aged appearance. The image map was then UV-Mapped onto the model via PoseRay. The template was made with UVMapperPro. FIGURES: The angels and the central figure were hand-coded triangle by triangle.... kidding :P They are standard poser female figures. For the central figure I posed the arms in four different ways, and exported the top three sets of arms separate from the body and re-combined them in POV, translating and rotating til they looked right. The jewelry, crown, collar, etc. are DAZ poser props. They were intended for the V4 model, so I had to morph and translate them a bit to make them work. They were then exported in obj format and UV-mapped as mesh2 format with PoseRay. The armbands and bracelets were giving me some trouble... one would fit and the other would be off... so I pulled them into NuGraf/PolyTrans, exploded them into polygons, recombined them as separate pieces, and exported them. Not sure why they were designed as a single object to begin with. The wings were also done in Poser, then UVMapped with PoseRay. The angel wings use the alpha channel for a partial transparency. LIGHTING: There's one orange-colored global light coming from the right-hand side of the scene, made with Jaime's Lightsys includes. Then I went through and made separate light groups for some of the objects to create some blue-tinted backlighting in the shadows. SKULLS: The skull is the morphing skull poser model off DAZ3D. The texture and bump mapping is my own creation done in Picture Publisher. I tried UV mapping them on and it didn't look right, so I simply projected them on instead. The placement macro was my own creation... it simply makes a wall of skull objects and adds some random rotation onto each one. At specified spots on the wall it adds in the eye's and horns. The eye's are simple CSG with a texture map. COINS/GEMS: The coins are simple cylinders with an image map and bump map, although most of the detail is lost at low resolutions. Ditto for the gems; I tried some include files (brilliant.inc, for example), but they simply add too much to the rendering time. The piles were made by a macro I wrote... it creates a bounding box and creates layers of coins, each layer with less then the previous one in such a way as to create a set angle (30 degrees I believe is what I picked).