EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
NAME: Bob Franke
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING
           COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Five Skulls Ritual
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.01,
TOOLS USED: PhotoStyler, Fractint, sPatch,
            Jim Bufalo's tree.exe,
            Nathan Kopp's lnsflare and Poser
RENDER TIME: 14 hours 53 minutes (anti-aliasing at 0.5)
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133 48MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Like many others, it was difficult for me to get an
idea for this topic.  After searching the Internet for
awhile, I decided to do something with black magic and
witch craft.

I call this image "The Five Skulls Ritual".  The
purpose of the ritual is to create an environment for
the casting of spells.  Like most everything done my
witches, this ritual is performed outside and at night.
The site of my scene is in some ancient ruins, possibly
on the Salisbury plains of England.

Performing The Ritual.
First a pentagram is carved into the earth.  A skull is
then placed a each point of the pentagram.  At the
center of the pentagram a cauldron is placed inside a
circle of rocks.  In the cauldron, a secret brew of
water, herbs, spices and oils is mixed.  Then the fire
is started.  When stream starts to form, and the brew
is about to boil, it's time to step back and get out of
the way.  As the brew reaches a raging boil, the five
skulls are energized with the light beams converging to
create a star burst.  It is now time to cast the spell.

P.S.
  In the IRTC Discussion List, someone released an
  advance copy of an image very similar to mine.  We
  have both independently created our images, and I
  wonder if there will be yet another with a similar
  concept.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The scene has 9978 objects.

The ground was created by subtracting a pentagram
shaped height field from a huge flat box.  The height
field was drawn with PhotoStyler.

The rocks, around the fire, were made with sPatch.
Fractint was used to create the star field image map.
The star burst is a modified version of Nathan Kopp's
105mm lnsflare.

I tried several programs and include files for making
trees.  For trees without leaves, I prefer Jim Bufalo's
tree.exe. However, I had to do some hand pruning to the
tree on the left.  The tree bark is based on Sonya
Roberts' birch bark.

Poser was used for the skulls.

The fire is a collection of halos around and under the
under the cauldron.

A halo was used for the steam above the cauldron.

The walls of the ruins were made with about sixty
superellipsoids. I used Fractint plasma clouds to make
the four height fields for the textures.  To save space,
only one of these height fields is included.

The light beams are just simple cylinders with a
slightly transparent texture. I experimented with using
halos, but the cylinder diameter is too small to make
it worth while.

4000 rocks are randomly scattered around the ground.
The rocks are spheres of random size and scaled
randomly on the x,y and z axis.

Finally, the light sources are added.  Most of the
illumination is from four area lights, around the
cauldron.  A light is located at the star burst and a
dim shadowless light is used for the starlight.

PhotoStyler was used for jpg conversion and adding
the copyright note.