EMAIL: Castlewrks@aol.com
NAME: Robert J Becraft
TOPIC: History
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: "1st A-bomb Explosion"
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://user.aol.com/castlewrks
         http://user.aol.com/castlewrks/metaphaze  <-- AD&D world
         http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lab/6080  <-- POV Main-Street w/ link to Cities Galleries

RENDERER USED: POV for Windows 3.02
TOOLS USED:  POV, Terrain Maker, I_View32
RENDER TIME: 28 minutes, 101.9 meg of memory
HARDWARE USED: IBM 750 laptop, 128meg ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
"1st A-bomb Explosion" is a poke at human nature.

"Guvinni and Lividicus members of the XXI legion have an addiction to dice.  On the day their cohort is
assembled for instructions, the two slip off to a corner to await the supreme commander's arrival and
get a bit too involved in their game.  When Flavius, the commander, arrives, he is none too happy to find
two members of the Imperial Roman army out of ranks and dicing in his administrative area of the fort.
In frame II, he clocks Lividicus with the helmet in his left hand and kicks Guvinni (the explosion part).
Both are drummed out of the Imperial Army and sent to fight in the gladitorial ring.  Ironically, both
live a long life and receive accolades for their survival in the ring while Flavius leads his troops into
ignomious defeat dieing on the short bronze sword of a naked wild-eyed blue-tatooed celt."

The picture is from the south-west corner of the administrative courtyard of a typical roman fort.  There
are 6 cohorts of infantry assembled, each with a Centaurian, Aeneatores, Aquiliferi, Vexillarius, and
Signiferi.  The three thurma of calvary each have a Vexillarius associated with them.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

If you have any questions about how this image was created or why it was done in this fashion, please
send me an email  (See address below).

This image is composed of heightfields for the fort wall foundations and POV Primatives for all objects.

The horses are from my previous IRTC submission (@themark).  The figures were built from the people.inc
file used in that submission, changing clothing to armor and adding in the roman theme features.  The
people.inc file was a modified version of the file by Wegnener.

The fort itself was started some time ago.  It was updated and utilized for this round of the IRTC.

Each object was created on a "drawing board" and then incorporated into the scene.

The creation process is basically the following steps:
1) Create terrain and base for the fort
2) Create specific buildings
3) Create standard soldiers
4) Create special figures (Flavius/Guvinni/Lividicus)

Specials:

All the arches are capped by raised stones.   In this view, the details of these arches are not as visible.

The texture on the gatehouse top is just that, a texture (upper right-hand corner).

There are more than 200 individual figures mixed in this render.  Most are generated from 6 hair-colors,
with or without beards of matching hair-color, some have weapons raised, lowered.  The mounted soldiers are
also mixed in order to add in randomness.

The gamblers have stacks of coins and dice placed in front of them.

The statue is a copy of all the figure parts with a stone texture applied to all the parts.

The file includes most of the fort.  The picture only shows the central administrative area of the fort
but there are barracks and workshops also included in the file.  The image is saved as 1statom.jpg, however,
this was generated from the fort.pov file.  See that for the source.

The mangonel (catapult) in the center was added for historical reasons since the romans were great
engineers of such weapons.

Alternate views are commented out in the main file.  To see these other views, comment the current view
and uncomment the new view.  Then render.

The grass tufts and brick curbing are specific to this view.  They would add too many objects to the render
to have them throughout.

Given more time, I would have extracted and utilized the blob-man hands and feet recently posted to the
povray.binaries newsgroup.  Time just didn't allow me to do this... so you'll have to forgive the original
feet and hands used.

Any comments or questions, please send me emails @ castlewrks@aol.com (Robert J Becraft)
