EMAIL:Stephen@OpCom.ca
NAME: Stephen Lumini
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: An Arabian Night
COUNTRY: Canada
RENDERER USED: POVRAY 3.0
TOOLS USED: POVRAY 3.0, MORAY 2.5b, Paint Shop Pro (to convert the TGA to a JPG and make the heightfield)
RENDER TIME: ~ 10 hours
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 75 - 24 meg RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Playing with the adage a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought to make a thousand and one nights into a picture; this is a tribute to Scherezade's colourful imagination.  Flying over a moonlit desert one a magical carpet some desperate soul (who we cannot see) has broken the seal of Solomon which had kept the mischevious genie in check.  As the gaseous djinn bursts free of the glassy prison, his blue skin slowly solidifies....
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THE IMAGE WAS CREATED: The idea came from the bottles I made in the "Gathering of a Storm" image.  I made the bottle from a rotation sweep.  The brass collar is two toruses bracketing a spiral of many cylinders (easily done using Moray).  The gold filigree and Purple band are actually a single layered texture.  to make it fit exactly I copied the bottle, enlarged it a very little bit, and "removed" the top half.  The carpet is a simple bezier patch with the image of a persian carpet I found on the internet.  The ghostly hands are Translational sweeps, with a layered, filtered texture.  The sharp edges of the sweep are "dulled" by the misty texture.  The moon is a sphere with a bumpy texture and an area light and finally the Star pattern is small white in a black color map with a frequency of .6