TITLE: Heaven and Hell
NAME: Miroslav Hundak
COUNTRY: Croatia
EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr
WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: iridium.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    hamaPatch 2.1, TextureView V3.42

RENDER TIME: 
    17h 16m 45s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P3-550E, 128MB RAM, ATA/66 HD


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Archangel Radiant swoops down from Heavens to meet his grim adversary at the
gates of Hell.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Every single object was modeled with the use of Hama Patch 2.1, which is, by the
way, an excellent program. Even though it's still buggy and unfinished it
offers considerably more than sPatch, and since version 2.1 features texture
editor that certenly made my life easier. Origato Sensei !!!!!!

There were three major objects in the scene: demon, angel and the cave, that
were modeled separately and then put together.

About Demon:
It's my own creation from tip to toe. I call it a generic monster. It has all
the features one would expect in a demon, a gargoylish stature, a
grining-large-teeth glowing-eyes face, spikes, dragon wings, a tail and last
but not least a very large sword. Construction of demon was considerably the
most time consuming, because I was still getting familiar with the modeling
program and because I was doing it from the scratch, so sometimes I had to wait
for an inspiration.
There's not much to say about the techique of modeling. Basically I just
visualized a cross section of a part and extruded it in 3rd dimension. After a
few extrusions I clay-modelled the object point by point until I got what I was
looking for, or something similar. There are 46 seperate parts that make up the
demon.
After reaching a conclusion that the red-skin-black-spikes demons (like Diablo)
was a bit worn off style I decided to make the skin look like stone as every
self respecting gargoyle should have and the spikes naturaly white like
polished bone. Red glowing eyes are just red  diffuse 1 ambient 1  globes, that
are transparent and inside of each is a red point light with fading. This is a
trick I use to avoid the use of media for halo to simulate glow.

About Angel:
Anyone familiar with Magic the Gathering card game would probably recognize this
angel as Archangel Radiant (it's a she apperantly). I used those cards I could
find that fetured a picture of Radiant to make the modeling easier. There are
several versions of Radiant however, as each artist made his own
interpretation, so my version is sort of like a meld of those. The angel's
wings still look a bit artificial, but there is a reason for that as I will
mention later. There are 41 sperate parts that make up the angel.
The armor was supposed to be gold and the suit was supposed to be
chain-mail-like. To texture the suit I used a scaled down bumpiness and a crand
feature. However after anti-aliasing it turned out a bit to smooth, so I
pretended hat it does look like a chain mail and imedietly felt better.

About Cave:
It took about 5 minutes to do the cave. It's quite plain and simple. Features a
stone bridge.

About the scene:
After using the dummy objects to position the characters I experimented with the
lighting. The whole scene has a built in scattering media and seven spot lights
that interact with it. These spot lights make the rays of light that shine on
and around the angel. There are three more area lights that don't interact with
media and cast soft shadows.

Now I know why they need hundreds of SGI machines to render those rather simple
looking cartoons:
As I mentioned earlier, the angel's wings look a bit artificial, but in order to
make them look natural they would require more layers of feathers, and since I
made feathers as objects, the wings made up for almost 50% of the number of
bicubic patches in scene. Now... bicubic patches are such a nice feaure for
spline modellers, but there is a catch. Every patch must be descrambled into a
large amount of triangles by the renderer. After seeing the POV-Ray reporting
that the last test render used up almost 600MB of free memory and parsing
lasted for well over 12 minutes I deceided to leave the angel's wings as they
are and make a dummy objects to ease my tests with lights and save my nerves.

No source? But why?
I truly regret that I was not able to provide people with source files. It is
not because I don't want to share, but because the size of it is considerable.
But if you really want it send me an empty CD-R and I'll send it back to you
with the source.
OK enough with the jokes. The source files (angel.inc, demon.inc, cave.inc,
scene.pov, scene.ini) take up almost 8.3MB so it would be a real waste of my
time and someone's drive space if I had sent it.

For other quesions conserning this image please refer to my e-mail at the top.


