EMAIL: karl@pemail.net
NAME: Karl Manning
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POVRAY 3.0 for Windows
TOOLS USED: 

SPatch V1.0 
Blob Sculptor 2.0a
PaintShop Pro
The usual lots of paper/coffee
Flat bed scanner

RENDER TIME: 10hours 4mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 32Mb memory Windows95
TITLE: Attack in the hall of the magician king

COUNTRY: England
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/ManningKarl/index.htm
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Yet another hapless adventurer trys to steal the magician king's power. Undetered the Magician repels the attacker with a blast from his staff, while preparing an entrapment spell.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Scenary:
The stone floor texture was a large scale crackle, overlaid with 2 mainly clear marbled layers, one rotated by 90 degress to give the joins between the flag stones. 

The throne is made up of simple boxes and cylinders. The back was a box with other boxes diff'd from it. The horns coming out of the throne are made using a while loop with cones rotated about the origin, and each cone scaled slightly smaller each time.

The braziers are a spiral. The cages on top are (open) cylinders rotated round the y-axis and clipped by a plane at the top end. The flames and the smoke are 2 haloes. There is a light_source placed in the fire halo, with fade_distance 5 and fadepower 1, so that the light fades off in the corners of the room. The embers are rounded boxes with a small scaled granite texture, and a high ambient value. These were randomly placed in a while loop.

The crystal ball's support are some cones, with the spiral2 texture on, which at an angle gives it a rather odd veiny type texture. The ball is several almost transparent spheres inside eachother, with an irid finish on them

Knight:

He is mainly made up of a mixture of squashed cones and spheres. The main breastplate was created using Spatch. The letters are from the font Angie. The armour texture is a reflective, high brilliance greyish-blue, with a slight dents normal scattered over it, to give it more of a dented (!) / hammered finish. His chainmail underneath is a spotted, highly dented texture, although its not so obvious.

The magic glow on the sword's blade is a crackled texture.

Magician:

The robes / belt were created in Spatch. Both of these had crackle textures applied at different depths/turbulence/scaling. This is fast turning into one of my favorite textures as it is so flexible. The hands are from the sample file that comes with Blob sculptor. The chain is some squashed torii. The staff is a cylinder with a randomised spiral cut from it to give it a sort of knarled and twisted look.

The Magician's face was created as follows. I scanned a picture of me in (no I dont look quite that fierce !). In paintshop pro I converted it to a grayscale, then ran it through the smooth filter a couple of times. This was saved as a gif and then used as a heightfield in POV. At first I used the original scanned picture as an image_map on top of the heightfield to colour it. This looked rather odd as the bright areas of the photo were already highlighted by the light sources in pov and so looked very washed out. In the end I used a plain flesh coloured image_map with the lips and the eye socket done in a dark brown. I think this looks very effective. 

The skull motif that appears in various places (throne, magician's belt buckle, pillars) is done in a similar way, although this time I didn't use a photo of me ! If you want to try some thing similar, the best types of photo are the passport type as you get a full facial, with uniform (if somewhat bright) lighting.

The main blast of magic is a selection of halos with a turbulence value of 3. Each one is rotated at random, and scaled/translated using a while loop. Every other one has a light_source associated with it. These have fade_distances and fade_powers of 2 so that they dont light up the whole scene.

The new spell is some randomly placed small spheres, within a scaled larger sphere, with a clear/cyan/white bozo texture. It also has a limited light source in it so it just lights up the magician's hand. Altogther there are about 20 different attenuated light sources within this picture ! Without the fadedistance/fade power options the room would be brilliantly lit !


Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net
4/8/97