EMAIL: rousseauc@bellarmineprep.org
NAME: Charles H. Rousseau
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Aerie
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.bellarmineprep.org
RENDERER USED: Bryce 4.0	
TOOLS USED: Mesh models of structures made in Rhino, terrain meshes are Bryce primitives; JPG conversion from bitmap in Corel Photopaint 9.0.							
RENDER TIME: 15 hours at Bryce's highest volumetric setting.	
HARDWARE USED: Classroom PC with 450 processor, 128 RAM.
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The image seeks to represent a large and mysterious complex set high in a cloudy, foggy mountain setting backed by dramatic sunlight streaming past the turrets onto the lesser structures below.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The front wall section was a shell modeled with multi-duplicate Boolean objects in Rhino, meshed and then swept in a broad arc and exported to Bryce as a 3DS file.  A scanned rock texture was applied to one copy of the mesh and the second Bryce open foliage texture was applied at small and random scale to a 101% duplicate of that same mesh to create the moldy surface which partially obscures the stone beneath.  The second level of the structure was much less detailed and with substantially less depth than the outer wall.  Two copies were meshed and fused and curved.  A smaller scale of the same stone texture was applied and the bump map of the same was pushed to its maximum since these stones would be small and deep in the fog.  The third section was originally six towers and six walls arranged in a hexagon, but it was broken up into smaller sections and the turrets were resized for both variety and to increase the illusion of depth. Colorful textures were originally applied to all parts of these structure, but the volumetric render tests all but obscured the detail, so much more generic colors were applied instead.
The Bryce sun is coming into the scene from a high 4:00 position and what looks like the sun is actually a spherical light set in the notch of the mountains and behind the large central turret.  The light is set to infinite, volume, no falloff.  There are two cloud layers, one in the normal sky position and one tipped between the main castle structure and the front wall to catch more of the beams of light.  If the clouds and volumetric are turned off in the scene, the details in the modeling show up much better, but the atmosphere of the piece seems lost.  I opted in the final render to let the mysterious element govern the image, although some of the details in the closer wall still remain.  I knew a volumetric render would take a long time, but I never imagined fifteen plus hours.  When I get more time, I am going to work on two more lights behind the mountains, thinner clouds but more layers, and a stronger texture contrast on the mountains in the back which just have the basic Bryce snow and thaw.  The image was rendered as a 640x480 bitmap and imported into Corel Photopaint for transformation to JPG format and reduction in file size.  The contrast-intensity-brightness of the image were nudged a little before saving to increase the contrast in the light beams between the towers.  I learned a great deal about light and fog from this exercise.