EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de
NAME: Norbert Kern
TOPIC: fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: menace
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: not yet
RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.7
TOOLS USED: Spatch, Moray, 3DWin, 3D-Exploration, UVMapper, 
	    OBJuvPOV, Swiss-PdbViewer, Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 38 h 01 min / 250 MB peak memory
HARDWARE USED: PII, 266 MHz, 224 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A pike threatens a river crawfish.
Attack or retreat? Its the moment of decision. 
The armoured crawfish, a fortress in itself, is further 
protected by its cave. The crawfish fluffs himself up, 
hold his body high, bends his after-body and extends 
his scissors.
The pike, no more camouflaged, has his speed and strength 
on his side.
But the fortress will be probably too strong this time.
Surely the pike will elsewhere put himself on wait in the 
muddy water...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The cave is a mesh consisting of 157.000 triangles. I used 
the Swiss-PdbViewer (http://www.expasy.ch/spdbv/) for this.
Normally the free program creates povfiles of protein 
structures from the corresponding PDB files.
The cave represents a part of the surface of a protein (active 
site of hydroxylamine oxidoreductase). I included a small 
image of mine in the zipfile to demonstrate this.
The texture is a variant of the rock walltexture from Robert 
Dawson I found at news.povray.org in povray.binaries.images
from 01/13/00.
Left above I placed a simple isosurface (ellipse with a wrinkles
function) in front of a cave part near the camera to hide the 
triangle structure.

The crayfish is a spatch model from http://village.infoweb.or.jp
/~fwip4752/Models_e.html . It seems, that the page exists not 
longer. To get the agressive gesture, I had to tweak nearly 
every part of the model.
The textures were created in moray and adjusted within povray.
Layered textures always caused a white shiny surface. I
already know this phenomenon from my last entry. So the 
textures are simple and not really convincing.
As a joke the crawfish stands on a stone, which actually is a 
mesh of an asteroid (http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~hudson/Research/
Asteroids/models.html).

The pike is based on a low resolution model of a barracuda
(http://216.165.190.132/asp/animals.asp). The max model was
converted to obj format with 3D-Exploration. Then I created an 
uv-map with UVMapper and the accompanying imagemap in Photoshop.
I made several fins with spatch, but none of them was
convincing and so I left the pike as it was.

As an atmosphere I chose several fogs like Johannes Ewers did in 
"aqua" (http://archive.irtc.org/stills/2000-06-30/view.html).
First I tried media, but renderings were awfully slow on my
outdated computer.
The image is my first trial with radiosity in megapov.
Time was running out and therefore the quality settings
arenīt very high. Especially the count number of 80 is too low.

The shell right above is one of Tsutomu Higoīs beautiful macros
(http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~nj2t-hg/ilpov15e.htm). A slightly 
smaller shell is placed in another one. After experimenting
with several mother-of-pearl textures I chose an imagemap for
pigment and normal component together with a very shiny finish.

The small slug left below is from Steve Gowers famous "bucket1"
(http://www.povray.org/preview/irtc-cd3/stills/19960831/view/
bucket1.htm). I adjusted only the textures.

The plants are mostly free models from http://www.3dplants.com/
and a leafless Tomtree (http://www.aust-manufaktur.de/
austv2x.html). Mostly imagemaps were used as textures.
As an aid to place the plants I took another alltime favourite
from me: Jaime Vives Piqueres "running" (http://www.irtc.org/
stills/1998-10-31.html). I used the riverbed and his
stonemacro. Nothing but a few small stones in front of the
cave can be seen in the finished image.

All files and imagemaps are included in the zipfile. I only
scaled the imagemaps down to reduce the size of the zip file.