EMAIL: macdonald@lonhelyg.freeserve.co.uk
NAME: Julian MacDonald
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: 
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray v3.3, Painter, Gimp, Hamapatch, sPatch, Wilbur
RENDER TIME:  40 mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 500 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A fairly straightforward take on the theme (I must try something more abstract next time). So, a castle.  I wanted an interesting viewpoint, however, and got the idea of a view through an archway with a portcullis when flicking through a book on castles.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I used Moray 3.3 to create the scene.  The castle was made via CSG and textured using the povray brick texture as I had trouble mapping an image to the shape (must look into uv mapping with Megapov). Each stone in the stone wall and arch was modelled separately using the translational sweep tool.  I used Painter to create the texture for the archway stones. The ivy was created in Hamapatch; I scanned in a real ivy leaf for the texture and created a patch in Hamapatch to match it and the fiddled around with the texture scaling and translation to fit.  I then made copies of different sizes and orientations and handplaced all 127 leaves onto the stem, which was also created in Hamapatch.  The ivy object had a big impact on the parsing time but I am pleased with the end result.  The plants in front of the castle were also made in Hamapatch as were the crows.

The portcullis was a CSG made from translation sweeps.  I made the texture in Gimp so that I could add the weathered black smears (which I saw in the photograph).  I had a bit of fun trying to match these to the actual black nails.

The sky was a layered texture sphere.  The flag was a Bezier patch textured with a touched-up image from a book on Celtic Stencils.  I used Wilbur heightfield program for both sections of landscape.  Adding noise to the small front section gave quite a nice grass effect which I found by accident.

That's about it.