EMAIL: howitzer@operamail.com
NAME: Timo Jousimo
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Norden's point of wiev
COUNTRY: Finland
WEBPAGE: http://www.thehowitzer.cjb.net
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.1g
TOOLS USED: Moray for Windows v3.3
RENDER TIME: 5h 32min 37s
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 2 300MHz / 352 MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I had been created most of this image already when I got the final idea. I was reading one gaming magazine and there was a rewiev of the game "B-17 Flying Fortress 2". That rewiev included a picture of a Norden bombardment targetting system and there I got an idea. Because my creation looked a kind of a boring and casual and it seemed to not have much of originality, I decided to move the camera to top of the fortress and create the Norden around it. Now it looked much better for me.
It's easy to see that my picture can't describe the B-17's point of wiev when targetting, because there's the helipad and doors of missile silos. I don't even really care if it's realistic (was Norden used when there was nuclear missiles or helicopters?) but still it looks much cooler this way. Earlier I tried to make a wiev from a TV-camera of a cruise missile, just before the hit, but I couldn't find a way to make it look good.
The base itself is some kind of a nuclear missile base located in a coastline. Someone has built it and someone else considers it a threat so it needs to be wiped out.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I started with creating the landscape. I found that heightfield is best way to create the landscape so I used few hours for creation of template. I edited this template few times so that it better fits to scene. Next thing was the water. I tried many things, and result was that there's no very good way to create realistic-looking water in Moray. Finally I created a large bezier patch and stretched it to wawes. Then I flattened wawes around the barriers. Finally, I created the texture that is reflective, partially transparent and bumpmapped. I also added a hollow sphere with a sky-texture so that the water would reflect the sky, like water does in real life. I'm not very satisfied with the water, but it's the best I could do for now. Maybe I could have done better if I had had more time.
Next phase was creating the fortress itself. It's mainly made of primitives and CSG's. Some spline objects were also used but there's only few dozens of those (11564 frame level objects total.) The radar dish in top of the larger building and in the guard tower (see the another-perspective wiev picture included within in source files) are taken from a space-ship I created in last january. All other objects are created specifically for this scene. Textures were also created mostly for this scene, altough some of them are taken from Moray texture library and then modified for my purposes.
Finally I created the Norden. It's simply one rotational sweep, few cylinders and couple hunderd cubes and they are aligned in front of the camera so that it looks like wiev trough Norden.
Textures are mostly very simple. Many of them are only one solid color, few is also bumpmapped. With them, there's couple of those with colormap pattern or few layers.