TITLE: The MystCastle
NAME: Florian Kastell
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: kingofmycastle@gmx.net
WEBPAGE: http://members.surfeu.de/tankproducts/thematrix/index.htm
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fkcastle.jpg
ZIPFILE: fkcastle.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g


TOOLS USED: 

LinkGen (which is a little POV-Ray Program to create chains, written by Tim
Wenclawiak,
a good friend of mine), Photoshop 5.5 (to paint the heightfield)


RENDER TIME: 

9 minutes 52 seconds
with these settings:
 1024x768, High 
Width=1024
Height=768
+AM2
+A0.3
+R5
+QR


HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 550, 256 MB PC-100 SD-RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Since a long time I'm working on my castle. In the beginning my castle looked
strange,
because I didn't have the knowledge to create acceptable textures and scenes
(you can see some earlier pictures on my website).

If you now look at my picture, you can see the work of many months, because
behind
this picture, there is a complete castle with main-tower (I'm just working on
it).
In order to stick to the rules of the IRTC I must explain, that thae main
concept of the castle
was already finished last year (the towers, walls), but most time of the work on
this picture
I've spent in the last two weeks. I've made new textures, objects, a new
sky_sphere and
atmospheric effect.

Now that the Competition decided to have "fortress" as the next theme, I thought
that
it could be a good chance to present my castle.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

In the picture you see the gate of a castle. The position of the camera is a
worm's-eye view.
Therefore you get the impression of a big castle. And to make it more mystic I
added two light
scources, one in the entrance and the other in greater distance to the castle.
The last one is
an area light with fading.
The sky is made of a sky_sphere and a plane. The sky_sphere has a gradient from
red to black.
A bozo texture with transparency simulates the clouds on the plane.
Fog and lightfading makes for an athmospherical touch.

Now to the castle: The towers and walls are simple CSG objects of cylinders,
boxes and cones.
In the beginning I focused more on the modelling than on texturing but know they
have become
more satisfactory. You can find them in the "castle_tex.inc".
The shields are CSG objects textured with checker and finished with metallic and
phong.
The drawbridge is made with a few boxes and covered with a modified wood texture
from the "wood.inc".
The levers are also covered with that texture. To create the chains I used a
little program, made with
POV-Ray (program written by Tim Wenclawiak).

