TITLE: A Child's View
NAME: Elroy S. Davis
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: EDavis@VermontCountryStore.com
WEBPAGE: www.lynn.ci-n.com/~esdavis
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: blckcstl.jpg
ZIPFILE: blckcstl.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows, V. 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray for Windows, V. 3.3
            Photoshop, V. 5.0 (for PNG to JPG conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    28 minutes, 35 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 200 MMX, 32 MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    An army of plastic soldiers stands ready to defend the
wooden-block castle of a child's imagination.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I began with the vague idea of
building a castle of blocks.  I started the project by modeling a single wooden
block in Moray.  I used a standard wood texture that is included with Moray for
the "white" color of the block.  I then began playing with the colorization of
that texture to create the various colors used on the blocks.  After the first
block was created, and the colors were satisfactory, I duplicated the block
several times and began "stacking" them in a manner similar to what a child
would do to create a castle.  I quickly realized that I would need other block
shapes to make a proper castle.  I added the arches and pillars, again using
the standard wood texture from Moray.  I began "stacking" again, and came up
with the final castle pictured.  
The next part of the castle was the drawbridge.  For some reason, I remembered
using things like popsickle sticks and pencils to build things with when I was
a child.  I grabbed a pencil from my desk and modeled that in Moray.  As an
inside fortress joke, the pencils are modeled after the ones manufactured by
Dixon-Ticonderoga (Fort Ticonderoga lies on the Vermont/New York border).  All
of the colors and textures on the pencils were "hand-mixed" in Moray.

Next, I had to decide what to do with the castle itself.  The idea of tin
soldiers came to mind.  After several unsuccessful attempts at modeling tin
soldiers, I gave up and began work on the cannon.  The cannon is made up of a
sphere, and various sizes of cones and cylinders.  Again, the colors were done
from scratch within Moray.  After the cannon was finished, I added the marble
"cannon balls" to help add to the toy effect.

I then had to decide what else to had.  I started working on a soldier again,
this time basing the design on a nutcracker.  I decided I'd put a single
soldier in the archway of the "gatehouse".

Although I'm still not entirely happy with the resulting soldier, I decided to
replicate him, in a smaller form, for the troops in the foreground.  I added
the cutlasses at the last minute to help destinguish them from the "general". 
The soldiers were created, again, from simple shapes and hand mixed colors.

