TITLE: "Dawn Patrol II"
NAME: Glenn McCarter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
JPGFILE: dpatrol2.jpg
ZIPFILE: dpatrol2.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 

  sPatch ( bezier patch manipulation )
  Paint Shop Pro ( heightfields, convert image to JPEG )

RENDER MUSIC: Holst "The Planets"

RENDER TIME: 
    1h 26m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II - 300 mhz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It's dawn in east Ariela.  The Towers remain a mute barrier against
the raiders from the east.  Sentries continue to keep a watchful eye
into the distance.  But all is quiet.  The barbaliens will not come today.

The Great Towers of Calita were begun during the d'Epping dynasty, from
221-206 bk.  About 2400xu (1500ip) long, the tower system is arguably the
largest artificial structure in the Nineworlds.  Ancient legends say that
if you follow the Towers all the way to the southeast, you will reach the
base of the luminant Arch, where untold riches lay waiting...

Nowadays, of course, Dreadnoughts do all the patrolling.  The great ships
dwarf even the tall Towers, which are now little more than a tourist
attraction.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The patrol ship, towers, bridges, and dock are CSG constructions created
directly in the POV-Ray text editor.  The tricky part was linking the
towers and the energy beams together in a flexible hierarchy.  The
landscape uses Julia fractals for most of the rock formations, and
height fields for the rest.

The biggest challenge was in overcoming a POV-Ray limitation on the max and
min dimensions in a single scene.  This scene contains scales from inches
to hundreds of thousands of miles, and beyond.  To work around this, all
celestial objects are just a fraction of their true scale.  For example,
the ring system is only a few hundred miles in diameter.

Two goals were important to me during the development of this image.
First is the concept of "rings", a theme repeated several times in the
scene, both visually and conceptually.  Rings around the structures,
rings around the ship.  A "patrol" around some perimeter.  The fencelike
tower system encircling a region.  And all of these echo the planetary
rings overhead.

The second main goal in the image is to have a strong focal point --
instead of merely showing a rocky landscape, I wanted to have a specific
reason for the scene to exist.  The focus is the very bottom tip of
the patrol ship as it approaches the docking station.  Note how nearly
every significant line in the image points to this area.  Lighting,
textures, and modeling detail also emphasize this area of the ship.

The concreteness of this focal point then helps to offset the elements of
mystery in the image:  Where is this planet?  Why is it necessary to have
such security measures?  Who are the barbaliens?

Thus is my own little imaginary world.  I hope you like it.

