EMAIL:ZenPsycho@yahoo.com
NAME:Breton Slivka
TOPIC:Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:Crater of doom
COUNTRY:USA
WEBPAGE:none yet
RENDERER USED:official povray v3.1g
TOOLS USED:Photoshop for textures and resizing, HLA, Moray.
RENDER TIME:about 1 hour at 2048*1152 no AA radiosity on. 
HARDWARE USED:800mhz athlon t-bird, 128megs ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A fortress city built inside a crater. Is it earth? is it a terraformed mars? is it some distant galaxy? where-ever it is, it looks like they're in trouble because their sun just went supernova! 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Well I was playing around in moray one day, building various building blocks... planning to create some unlikely building block constructions you only wish you could have built when you were 5. Then I read the topic of irtc and figured this was right up that alley. So I decided to give it a landscape to live in.. after struggling with some rather videogamish looking mountainranges I got HLA (a derivitave work of HF-lab) and played around with it for a while til I got a good looking crater, applied the diff command to get it's slope and took both the hf and the slope map into photoshop and messed around till I got a slope dependant-esque looking image map to put on the hf. then I bulit up some scaffolds and platforms and other things into there. at first I thought i'd place each building individually in moray.. but after that became too tedious a task I decided to go back down to script level and write a macro to randomly place them for me. turns out that was more trouble than it was worth because it caused povray for windows to crash every time.. after a week or two of wasted time trying to fix it, I discovered that the problem was that I had way too many long filenames.. and while povray for windows claims to be able to handle those.. apparently it can only do that on a limited basis. so I changed all the filenames around and meanwhile built the central tower and the fortwalls around the edge. .yesterday at the last minute I made a bunch of lighting changes.. I didn't get to add everything I wanted to... but I think this is pretty close to my original vision. Thank you.
since there's a lot of tangled code, image maps etc....I'm afraid the source code will be unavailable for this on, unless you specifically request it.