EMAIL: earlec@rocketmail.com
NAME: Colin Earle	
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Donnatar Castle
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: povray 3.0g for windows
TOOLS USED: PhotoImpact SE for the heightfield
RENDER TIME: 13mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 500
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A re-construction of a castle ruins I once visited on 
the East Scottish coast. The landscape is lush green grass with very few trees.
The castle itself sits on top of a squarish island carved from the surrounding 
coast surrounded with cliffs. A small land bridge connects the castle to the 
mainland. Cold, wet and windy. Not my ideal sea-side holiday house.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The first thing was to create the height field to use as the landscape. I'm 
sure there are better ways to create a landscape, but this is my first image and
after many hours of experimenting, I left it as is.
Next step was to construct the castle itself. All bricks are superellipsoids with the 
exception of the front gate arch and corner towers. For the front arch I used cylinders
and for the corner towers, a linear spline.
At this stage I discovered how to use the povray language a little better
and hence, the building to the front left took much less time to construct using while
loops. I attempted to use a 'difference' to cut the windows out, however, this increased
the rendering times by an unacceptable amount of time, so I just removed some bricks.
Originally, the bricks in the castle presented nice little uniform patterns from a 
distance. To remove this effect, I rotated the original brick around the three different
axis to give the walls a slightly more random look and remove the patterns.
The trees in the background come from a very nice tree generator macro, complements of
Sonya Roberts (sonya_roberts@geocities.com) and accompanying tutorial.
Sky and water are slight modifications from tutorial links from the POVRAY web site.