EMAIL: AvataR@GMX.Net
NAME: Garvin Hicking
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: 'Magicians Home'
COUNTRY: Germany [Remagen]
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/HickingGarvin/
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02.watcom and Povray 3.02.unix
TOOLS USED:
      - sPatch (Socket of the column in the middle of the room,
                the two Shields,
                The Claws on top of the column)
      - SPARKLE-Generator (The lightnings)

      - LensFlare-Plugin by Chris Colefax (LensFlare)

      - DOS-Editor (Halo and Lensflare-placing, Texture-modifications)

      - Paintshop Pro (Modification and Generation of image-maps)

      - Moray (everything else)

RENDER TIME: about 190 hours, distributed to my PC and four SPARC4s
HARDWARE USED: iP133, 48MB RAM, 3,7GB Harddisk / Sun Sparc4
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

'My home is my castle' :)

You can see the 'ready-room' of a Magician. It's in a fairly
large tower with the typical castle-effects in it, like hanging
carpets, some mirrors, Crossing Swords and Axes, Torches and so on.

The main thing is the magic ball on the column. It's surrounded by
claws, and lensflares/lightenings are striking on it. The ball itself
is surrounded by a halo and it's typical crystal-glass.

The camera is showing a 'frog-perspective' of the image, and by decreasing
the FOV, everything seems to surround you.

On the floor you can see the shadow of a the magician, who's walking
upon the column...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is my second image to the contest. I was just doing a
just-for-fan column and then realized that I could use the whole scene
for the current topic. I also stick close to povray-options,
and besides the shadow of the magician, nothing is done by triangles
or alikes. The shadow was converted from a simple lathe to triangles,
because I chose the Option 'Glyph' in Moray...otherwise the shadow
would really look creepy.

As I said, the socket and claws of the column are modelled in sPatch.
I revised my formely build torches for this image, and made it a bit
more realistic by assigning different textures and putting the
objects more smoothly together.

The rest is hard to explain, but my biggest problem was the render
speed of the image. I finished the source-code around 3. August.
Then I rendered the first lines in good resultion and found out
that it would take about 2-3 months to finish the image. So I had
to reduce Quality (Jittering, Antialiasing, Resolution) and I hope
the image will be completed in the last week of August.  I really
had some good radiosity-ideas for this image, but crap - forget it,
it's way too slow. If anybody every stumbles around my file and has
some good computers, maybe (s)he will try to render it with radiosity,
and show me the result???!


I have included the whole source-code without image-maps. Those you
simply have to do by yourself, I think it should not be hard. The
following images were used:

gilamons.gif:   A texture for the mirrors
limesto3.gif:   The texture for the wall. Extremely realistic looking
paper.gif:      The texture for the ground. A bit marble-loooking
pat0006.gif:    A pattern for one of the hanging carpets
pat0007.gif:    A pattern for one of the hanging carpets
pat0039.gif:    A pattern for one of the hanging carpets
pat0107.gif:    A pattern for one of the hanging carpets
stucco.gif:     The texture for the column
tanleath.gif:   A texture for the leather-handle of the swords.

Many objects in the source-code (and as you may have noticed, the imagemaps
too) are referrenced by their german name. The source also is very
untidied, and not cleaned-up or commented. I mostly didn't put a name
on my objects...0:-)