TITLE: Hall Of The Mountain King NAME: Peter B COUNTRY: Scotland EMAIL: Comradevladimir2@yahoo.co.uk WEBPAGE: none yet... TOPIC: Epic Proportions COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: hallpb.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: My Brothers Digital Camera, Paint Shop Pro for Heightfield Editing RENDER TIME: around 3 days HARDWARE USED: 3ghz Linux machine - not mine so I havent got details. Test rendered on a Celeron 733 - took around 4 days to do some test renders at half size with the area light commented out. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The Railing Pillars are SOR, the big pillars are csg. I might be able to release these files later but at the moment I cant as I am running out of time and the bits and pieces from the scene will need some retrieving(one day I will manage to write a well organised scene file...). The heightfield sources and image maps will probably never become available asthey are so big- the background image is something like 14 megs and I dont have broadband. There are stairs to the rear of the hall that are invisible in this image but may be visible in a future picture when I get my website (and Gallery) on the web. I tend to get carried away making bits and pieces like this that wont be seen in the final picture but make the building structurally sound. The most problems in the scene were from the media. Trying to get it smooth, non speckly and rendering in a sensible amount of time is hard enough and when you add an area light well... For a preview to see how the media would look like in the final scene I left my computer rendering while I went away for the weekend. 3 days later I came back and it was only 60% done. 4days and 19 hours later it finished only for me to realise I had set the intervals too low. A lot of the patterns in this picture are based on heightfields. This allowed me to make subtle engravings on say the end metal pattern and still have proper reflections of the hall. One of the main problems with the composition of this scene is the lack of texture. Without the carpet decorations and doors(hidden in this view) the scene would be almost entirely white. I have tried to use subtle marble textures to differentiate between marble and plaster. The Roof supports and lamps were a late addition to the scene and liven up the ceiling area dramatically. The hall is created larger than the size of the man would suggest. This and the fact that the image was rendered with a tall thin aspect ratio helps to make the hall imposing. The light shining through the end window helps heighten this as it casts huge shadows on the media that dwarf the man. I have also used a low viewing point so pillars converge towards the top of the scene. this also gives a feeling for the giant scale of the scene. The man in the scene is a heightfield created from a photo and edited in PSP. I had to think quite hard about how to do the person as I can't afford expensive tools like poser and without a human in the picture it would look boring. The heightfield has had its waterlevel adjusted to cut around the shape of the human. I could have probably used an image map to make him more detailed however as I wanted him to be a silhoette any way and as I am not a big fan of using image maps in scenes- they lack depth, I stuck with this method. HOW THIS IMAGE RELATES TO THE TOPIC I looked up Epic in the dictionary and it means a legendary tale or poem. I thought that this suited itself to an image out of a fairy tale or a fantasy . I had tought of the hall and drawn some rough sketches of it when making another scene a while back however I had not started creating it. I thought that a hall like this might suit itself to a story like this however as the topic was Epic proportions and not just epic, I had to involve size somewhere A very small hall would not be right so I decided to make the hall larger than life size and use a tall thin aspect ratio to help make the building imposing. I thought about making it cavernous and dank but in the end I decided that it should be built of marble with regal touches( the red carpet ) to help emphasize the fairytale qualities of the theme.