EMAIL: alan@jumpnet.com
NAME: Alan Grover
TOPIC: magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Magic's Shrine
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: wcvt2pov, Fractal Painter, Fractal Poser
RENDER TIME: 2d 0h 13m 14s
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 100MHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
This is a shrine to magic in the College of Magical Knowlage, where students
study and contemplate.  The shrine represents the Four Elements and the
power of human magic and intellect to combine them and shape them.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
This originally started as an idea for a texture, the crystal and gold wire.
It's amazing how one little texture can get you into so much trouble.
The trouble all revolved around the lights that represent Fire.  I originally
tried to have actual lights, and had about 70 lights in the entire scene (the
spotlights on the statue and in the pool were all area lights).  After a 
day or two of rendering it became appearent that it was going to take about
2.5-3 *months* to render.  I then moved the Fire lights to a seperate .pov
file and used the image from that as an image map, which worked a lot better.
The statue model is a Fractal Poser model, which I posed, exported as .dxf,
and smoothed and converted to .inc with wcvt2pov.  The rest of the environment
is straightforward CSG and scripting (for the columns).