TITLE: Something Wicked This Way Comes NAME: Alexandre Dorion COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: alexandre.dorion@rogers.com WEBPAGE: N/A TOPIC: Light and Fog COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: somethin.jpg ZIPFILE: somethin.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.5, POVTree 1.5, Blobman RENDER TIME: 1 hour 8 minutes 22 seconds (4102 seconds) HARDWARE USED: HP Compaq dc7100, Pentium-4 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The phrase "Something Wicked This Way Comes" originates in Shakespeare's play Macbeth. So in keeping with the time-period, I wanted to show a foggy and cold scene with Elizabethan or Medieval buildings lit with lanterns, and something emerging from the fog. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Houses: I exported 3 different medieval houses created by Thomas de Grootin in Moray. I glued them together and with the ultra-wide camera, it creates a nice perspective image. Trees: I used POVTree to create these leafless trees. Both trees are the same, just scaled and rotated to look different. Figure: I used Peter Houston's Blobman macro to create a figure wearing the sample clothes, then I hid him in the fog beside/behind the building. Lights: These are tiny area lights inside the yellow glass of the lanterns along with spheres to enhance the reflections on the glass. The soft shadows on the house and ground work really well, but I'm not satisfied with the light source. I would have liked to create a glow, sparkle or halo, but I found that using media{interior} within atmospheric media like fog created voids. Anyone have any suggestions/hints? Fog: I used constant fog for hiding the background and ground fog for over the cobblestones. High turbulence for the ground fog made it lumpy in some spots. The perspective from the wide-angle camera also makes the fog angle upwards a bit. ... and a little bit of focal blur, which I find does a better job than standard anti-aliasing. A.