EMAIL:          gautam@interlog.com
NAME:           Gautam N. Lad
TOPIC:          Magic
COPYRIGHT:      I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:          The Spell
COUNTRY:        Canada
WEBPAGE:        http://www.interlog.com/~gautam
RENDERER USED:  POV-Ray v3.01.msdos.wat-cwa
TOOLS USED:     Mid Night Modeller v2.10 (Main modeller),
                POV-Ray v3.01.msdos.wat-cwa (Main renderer),
                LView v3.1 (.TGA to .JPG Conversion, Copyright text, and
                 Gamma correction),
                Dyeworks v1.40 (Various image conversion),
                Xspred v2.02 (anti-aliasing of wall bump map),
                GRAFX 2.00 94.666% (wall bump map, eyeball, touch-up of
                 book paper, touch up of rat)
                Texture Blender v1.0 - From POV-PAK v1.0 (Used to make
                 pigments for wall, paper, skull),
                MS-Paintbrush (text on spell paper),
                sPatch v1.0 (spell paper.  The cuts were removed,
                             after paper was exported as a DXF, in MNM),
                Blob Sculptor (claws for crystal ball, ink blob),
                RAW2POV v1.8 (Skull object & spell paper conversion)
                Tracer Timer v1.0 - From POV-PAK v1.0 (To time rendering),
                ColorDesk Photo (scanning software - book paper texture)
                
RENDER TIME:   1 hours  6 minutes  9 seconds (3969 seconds)
HARDWARE USED:  486 DX2 50MHz with 8MB of RAM (Computer)
                Logitech ScanMan 256 Color Scanner


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
The story behind this image:

"It is almost morning, and it is the day when Greshando will take over the
kingdom of Nanark, where he is the Head sorcerer.
He and his fellow sorcerers have been feed up with the way they are being
treated, so they formed a union, and now he, with his fellow magicians,
have created this spell.  With this spell, they will have the power to
control everyone, because it will give the sorcerers the power to know
what each person is thinking, and the ability to manipulate  one's
memory."

A note about this story and image:
You might want to note how clumsy this sorcerer is.  His magical wand
is just lying around, ink from the bottle is spilled, and his spell paper
is ripped.  And what else? He hasn't wiped the blood off the knife, and
there is a rat running around. Morning is slowly approacihing (look at the
window in the crystal ball's reflection), and it is time!

(As you can tell, I'm no story teller!) ;)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Well, I can certainly say I've improved over time.  Anyways, here's
how I went about doing the image...

First thing I did was created a single claw used for the crystal ball,
in Blob Sculptor.  My first idea for the scene contained nothing more than
a crystal ball, a paper, and a skull.  But I needed more objects (as with
most of my scenes)!!!
So, I then got the idea of the classic skull and candle (candle on top
of skull).  I got the skull off the Net. I just did a search for
SKULL.DXF, and found a that file.  But the candle was hard to come up
with, so I left the candle for later.

I then created a paper in Rhino, made it look old and ripped using MNM,
but it didn't suit my needs, and it was a little chunky.  So, I used
sPatch to make a curved paper extrusion, and then exported it as a
smooth DXF.  I then used MNM to take some of the triangles out of the
edges to give the ripped effect.

I then created the texture for the paper, which turned out to be useful
for the skull also. The text was added in using PaintBrush, using
the Symbols font.  I typed in a few words in the first paragraph that
make sense, but the rest is gibbrish.  See if you can figure out the
first paragraph! ;)

Next thing was the wall.  I wanted a nice bumpy/rocky wall.  I couldn't
make one out of a built-in normal (bumps, normal_map,etc.), 'cause for
one they would've been REAL slow to render, and wouldn't be REALLY bump!
So I resorted to a bump_map.  I used a small graphics editor to make a B&W
wall map, and then anti-aliased it repeatedly using Xspred.  The
result was exactly what I wanted.  Looks rather neat, I must say myself!

I then created the wood and table, and then went on to create a candle,
a book (w/ random colours), a jar, and an eyeball for the jar.
I wanted to create a nice bloby, melted candle, but I didn't know how.
I then realized I could use blobs using #while loops, and randomly placing
drips.  It worked just right.  Be sure to look out for a plug-in for
this soon.  I could've used the ISOSurface patch version and the
Candle Plug-in by Chris Young (Dastardly), but I didn't have time
to download either.  Still, mine doesn't look that bad.  It looks greyish,
but hey, this sorcerer is a mess - hardly cleans his room! ;)

The cloth gave me some troubles, but I managed to make a good one using sPatch.
The exported bicubic patch took too long to render, and made the system
slow, so I exported it as DXF, and imported in MNM and exported to .RAW,
and finally used RAW2POV to make the cloth triangles.  That's a lot, but
it saves time. 
Eyeball was also trouble, but it worked OK.  I started using
an onion color_map, until I realized I could've done the same thing
using spheres+cylinders and intersection/difference to make a better eyeball
(and I did).  You're not going to notice a gradient in the eye, but a single
pigment is enough.

The latest thing I did was changed the books, and created the ink bottle,
quill, and the ink blob.  I made the quill entirely in MNM using a closed
curved polyline, and then conesweeped, increasing the number of triangles
for smoothness.  I also added the rat, which would've been
hard to model, so I resorted to an image map, with the background
invisible (transmittance).  I also used GRAFX to remove the white border
near the rat's edges.  The knife was a last minute idea.  Guess where the
blood is from (alright, it's related to all those fresh eyeballs)!

Overall the image could use some improvements, but it looks pretty good
(plus, I'm busy to do anything about it).

(Submitted: August 15, 1997)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Spell -- Copyright (C) 1997, Gautam N. Lad.  All Rights Reserved.

NOTE:  If YOU wish to use this image/file for ANY purpose, you MUST first
       contact me at my e-mail address to notify me.
       Visit my website to find software/graphics/links, etc. at:
       http://www.interlog.com/~gautam
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