TITLE: Quest
NAME: Stephen C. Baker
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: sbaker@tiac.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.tiac.net/users/sbaker
TOPIC: A Magical Quest
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: quest.jpg
ZIPFILE: quest.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Raydream Designer 4.1.3

TOOLS USED: 
    Fractal Design's Poser 2.0 and Radical F/X, Povray, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    6 hrs.

HARDWARE USED: 
    200 MHz Pentium Pro - 64 Meg memory

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    I've always associated "real" magic to ancient times and
especially knights
and their quests.  This scene is the knight either at the beginning or the end
of a quest. Let
the viewer decide.  The object of the quest seems to be the semitransparent
crown.  The wizard
obviously has powers, judging from the lightning bolts and fire he can summon.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The Figures:
Poser was used for the the skulls, skeletons, the dryads, the minitor, the
knight and wizard.  The clothing supplied by Poser is very limited so I had to
free from model the wizard's robes with Raydream Designer.  This turned out to
be very difficult.  Ever try to get an irregularly shaped form, the robes, to
drape over another irregular form, the human body? The only part of the human
body left over from Poser for the Wizard are the head, hands and feet. (I had
to get rid of everything else.)  I used a similar technique for the knight but
I kept the arms and legs also.  The knight's armor are the arms and legs scaled
by about 120% along the lateral axis and shaded with a metallic bump map.  The
other figures are straight out of Poser.  Poser allows you to substitute any
body part with any object.  I substituted the human head with a bull's head to
create the minitor.  I choose Poser's skeleton display form for the skeleton
supports and skulls on the castle's porch. 
NOTE: Poser supplies props that you can attach the the figures.  That is where
the sword and hair come from.

The Castles and Props:
The castle, back wall, non-humaniod parts of the porch, front stair, knight's
shield and cloth tunic, the wizard'd robes, beard and staff, the large tripod
pots were modeled using Raydream Designer'd free form modeler.

Fire and Ground Fog:
These elements come from Raydream's Radical F/X extension.  As such, they are
simply other object that are added to the scene.

Lightning:
The lightning came from Povray.  I could not find anything in my current crop of
Raydream tools that could do better than Povray textures for making the
lightning.  The background lightning was generated and Povray and used as a
background for the picture.  Another lightning bolt was used as a texture may
on a transparent cube to make the lightning bolt between the wizard's staff and
the knight's sword. (The source code and bitmaps are supplied in the zip
files.)

Texture and Shading:
All the textures except for the lightning and the coat-of-arms are from Raydream
Designers's standard set of 'shaders'  The coat-of-arms I downloaded from the
web and used it as a texture map.  I can't remember which site of which family
name it represents, I down loaded so many.

Lighting:
The scene uses 8 sources of lighting.
1. A gray ambient light is used.  It is set to gray and about 30 134922300ntensity.  It
is simply a shadow killer.
2. A green distance light is used, set to about 35 134922300ntensity - shadowless, just
to five an overall green cast to the image.
3. Behind the wizard is a low intensity red spotlight, shadowless, focused on
the stair and wizard.  This light does not extend far beyond the end of the
stairway and it is used to give the scene red highlights. 
4. A low intensity gray spotlight, shadowless, is focused on the wizard and
knight.  This light does not extends far beyond the wizard.  Its purpose was to
kill the extreme backlighting the foreground scene experiencing.
5 & 6 inside each tripoded pot is a red spotlight aimed upwards with a 45 degree
angle.  This light is used to give the undersides of the dryads a reddish glow.
 It helps make the fire a little more realistic.
7 Inside the castle is a yellow low intensity light, shadowless, with a short
travel distance.  This light was used to primarily prevent the insides of the
castle, seen through the door and porch windows, from being totally black.  The
short travel distance also helped give the feeling of depth.  (look in the
castle door)
8 There is a light inside the lightning bolt that is between the wizard and the
knight.  This is a 100 134922300ntensity, shadowed white light.  This is the scene's
main light source.  All the scenes shadows come from this light.  It's travel
distance is limited because it caused the left dryad's shadow to be very
pronounced on the outer walls.  I found that somewhat distracting.

Zip files:
I included everything but the Raydream Designer's rd4 file in the zip.  Mostly
because it is very large (9Meg/3Meg zipped) and it would be of limited use to
anyone without Raydream Designer.  In the spirit of the competition I will send
it to anyone on request and I will export any part of the scene into DXF format
and send that.  (A dxf version of the entire scene could be over 20 to 30
megs)


Adobe Photoshop was used to add my name and to give me reverse black and white
bitmaps of the
lightning to be used in Raydream's glow chanel for the lightning texture map

(For those not familiar with these modelers, Poser is a $100.00 human figure
modeling
program and Raydream Designed is a free form modeler and rendered also about
$100.
Both products are from Fractal Design Corp.  http://www.fractal.com)