TITLE: The Gathering Armies
NAME: Virtu Halttunen, Steve Jackson
COUNTRY: Finland, USA
EMAIL: virtu@iki.fi
TOPIC: Epic Proportions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: armies.jpg
ZIPFILE: armies.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 1.0 for Macintosh

TOOLS USED: 
    MacMegaPov 1.0, Graphic Converter, iChat AV for audio and video
conferencing, paper and coloured pencils for sketches

RENDER TIME: 
    55.34.04 plus 0.55.11 to parse

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual 867MHz PowerMac G4 with 1 GB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The general watched the armies gathering on the field.  High above their heads,
the white cliffs of their prize sparkled in the morning sun.  No one knew where
these glittering monoliths had come from.  Some said they had fallen from the
sky. But no time remained for myths and legends.  The only thing that mattered
was the battle ahead, the battle that needed to be won.  The colony could not
afford to lose this kind of treasure.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Due to the organic nature of the scene, most of the objects are either blobs or
isosurfaces. The ants were built by hand, the plants using loops and macros. 
Each individual grain of sand is an intersection of two prisms, rotated and
scaled randomly.

The sand is distributed by tracing points from a slightly jittered rectangular
grid down onto the ground.  For each point on this grid, the normal is found at
the point of intersection.  The starting point is then transformed by that
normal, and traced onto the ground again.  This way, the sand tends to "roll"
down hills and bumps.

The sugar cubes were first placed manually using placeholder boxes.  For the
final render they were replaced by macro-generated cubes consisting of several
thousand tiny boxes.

Both the rocks and the terrain are isosurfaces based off layered pigment
functions.  The "MakeTerrainRoot" macro used to generate the terrain's pigment
function is a slightly modified version of a macro developed for a previous
IRTC submission by the same authors.

Some ground fog was added for depth, and the shadows were softened with area
lights.

The final scene contains 689,973 objects.

And of course, some issues were only noticed after the final render, when it was
too late to fix them...