EMAIL: jlfishe1@uiuc.edu
NAME: Jason Fisher
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Southern Outpost
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g
TOOLS USED: TREES version 3.0 written by Sonya Roberts
RENDER TIME: 43 min. 47 sec.
HARDWARE USED: 500 MHz Pentum III w/ 256 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
     During the year 1150, in a world of fantasy not like our own, the
Wolfen kind banded together with the intent of wiping out all other
sentient life on the continent of Forestall.  The other races were
cuaght badly unprepared for such an invasion and the humans were still
colonizing the continent.  Thus the wolfen made much initial progress.
But by 1151 the humans and other races put up an effective resistance.
The war dragged on for four more years and the wolfen finally relented
and withrew.  In 1160, the humans formed a kingdom riding on the momentum
of the war. So that humans would not again be caught off guard, Duke Otto
von Flechandand established six outposts were, each about a days ride
from the three major Bavrhand citadels.  However, the extreme
circumstances that caused the formation of the kingdom abated and peace
again settled on Forestall.  With the death of King Donato the kingdom
fell apart into its three dutchies.  Because they were no longer needed,
most of those outposts fell into total dissrepair by 1220.  However,
because the southernmost one was close to a major trade route it was
saved from this fate.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
     The outpost is just a collection of superellipsoid objects, rotated
and tranlated into the appropriate places, except for the door which is
a small collection of boxes with a wooden texture.
     The birch trees and bushes were created using the TREES utility,
written by Sonya Roberts.  That utility produces pretty convincing trees
and the brich bark texture that comes with it is pretty good as well, but
I specified the texture the leaves on the trees and bushes and the
texture for the bark on the twigs and branches of the bushes.  It was
pretty hard to come up with a realistic texture for the leaves,
especially on the bushes near the camera.  I'm still not totally happy
with what I used, but I just can't come up with with a simple pattern
that looks any better.  And I don't want to use anything too complicated
because when it is applied to the many thousands of leaves in the scene
it could add alot of time to the rendering.
     The ground is a height field made from the hillside.tga file and
textured with a simple wrinkles type pattern.  The fade to dirt around
the outpost and the trail leading away from it was made with another
height field that was placed on a flat spot in the first hieght field and
then textured with a gradient type pigment map pattern.
     Finally, the whole thing was rendered at 1024x768 with an AA value
of 0.3, to get rid of all of the little nasties and sharp edges.  All in
all, it's pretty simple, but there was alot of work put into getting the
textures on the trees to look decent and in makeing the height fields
base images do what I wanted them to.