EMAIL:mfraser@kw.igs.net
NAME:Morgan Hamish Fraser
TOPIC:Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:The jilted sorceress
COUNTRY:Canada
WEBPAGE:http://www.kw.igs.net/~mfraser
RENDERER USED:POV-RAY for windows ver 3.00e and ver 3.02
TOOLS USED:LViewPro, Sonya Roberts Tree.inc, Hero Ngauv People Plugin
RENDER TIME:120 hours +
HARDWARE USED:Pentium Pro 200Mhz Dual Processor, Pentium 133Mhz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The sorceress pictured in this image was recently dumped by her lover.  She was not very impressed, so she traveled into this deserted glade in a forest.  Here she has drawn her magic circle and is attempting to summon a demon to exact her retribution.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The first part of the image to be done was the concentric circles of the magic circle.  These are a collection of randomly positioned spheres at various radii along the ground.

Next came the rocks.  There are actually 2 types of rocks where are both made of randomly positioned and sized spheres in a blob object.  4 of these rocks surround the circle directly.  Many additional ones are scattered through the forest surrounding the circle.  The mountains in the distance are atually the same rocks just scaled up.

Next came the trees.  Initially I created various stick trees and placed the roughly around the circle.  Some are scaled taller to create variety.  The taller ones are more numerous and simpler than the shorter ones.  I had to do this because the short trees with lots of leaves were chewing up way too much memory during the parse.  All the trees are created using Sonya Robert's tree.inc file.  The basic seed parameters for each tree was randomly generated so that every tree is unique.

Next came the torches that you see around the circle.  They are actually just a collection of 5 'twigs' or slightly varied length squished together.  The white bone spiralled around the outside was constructed with a blob object.  The flames on top were the really tricky part:  when I finally finished with them, they became 3 spheres of different sizes, each with a halo inside.  A light source is placed inside.  Please note that this is probably the best way to slow a rendering down - even my thumbnail renders took forever when I included these halos

I then added the strange magical mist which the sorceress conjured up.  This is simply another halo object.  The ground mist is also a halo, and its interaction with the larger section alters the colours of the main halo to what you see now.  A bright light source is placed in the center of the mist.

The tent in the background was then added along with the 2 barrels (kegs) and the two mugs (which you can barely see).  A stack of books was also created beside the tent.  I then added the little rods around the edge and centre of the magic circle.  To create variety, the rods all have a random rotation and scaling.

The person was created using a modified version of Hero Ngauv's People Plug-in for Povray.  I added the long hair, bracelets and clothing to his basic outline.

I then started rendering for 5 days..........

PS: the gif files for the people plugin are not included in the zip file - please contact me or get the people plugin if you need them.