TITLE: The Air Fort of Nuvir
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tf_fort.jpg
ZIPFILE: tf_fort.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        POV-Ray for Windows v3.1


TOOLS USED: 

        POV-Ray editor
        MetaCreations Poser 3.0 for Windows


RENDER TIME: 

        15 hours 11 minutes  14.0 seconds


HARDWARE USED: 

        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It is a rare sight indeed. This unique vehicle is the flagship vessel for the
nation of Nuvir, arguably the most politically powerful nation of this world.

The flight of such a vast object is facilitated, as with most flying vehicles,
by a load-stone in the centre of the fort. Obviously the load-stone in a
vehicle of this size must be quite exceptional, and it is; The skill of Nuvian
miners, along with Nuvir's rich mineral deposits, resulted in the mining of the
largest single load-stone in existence, nearly 4 times larger than any other.
The Nuvians brought the stone to Torace, the home of the most skilled
engineers, and commissioned the building of the largest flying vehicle ever
made.

Today it returns to Torace, the country where it was created, for regular
maintenance. On board are known to be Prince Henrick of the Nuvian royal
family, accompanied by Lady Whitlow who is visiting The Fort from her home in
Panjii. Also on board, as usual, are the mobile core of Nuvir's governing
council, consisting of diplomats and special envoys selected to present to the
world the benevolent public image the Nuvians desire.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is a really complicated image, so I won't try to explain it all here. I've
provided the full source (apologies for it being a bit untidy), if you have a
question about any specific effect feel free to e-mail it to me. Pretty soon
I'll be putting some of the original sketches as well as a ludicrously high res
render up on my website.

The image (and indeed the story) is inspired primarily by role playing games.
Particularly the Final Fantasy series, but also Skies of Arcadia and Lunar
Silver Star Story Complete. Also various other influences contributed; Terry
Pratchett's Discworld books, Disneyland, Japanese Anime (Laputa), and of course
the real world inspired much of the scenery! Hopefully none of this has
resulted in plagiarism :)

I'll just briefly explain how I built the various elements of the image: The
mountains, foothills, and coastline are heightfields. The ground and sea are
concentric spheres (about 6000km radius in the scale of the image). The sky is
another sphere, concentric to the ground, and the sky's colour is acheived with
media (hence distant objects fading to blue). The clouds consist of 32 layers
on some more spheres, so they dip realistically behind the horizon. The town,
fortress, and ships are all straightforward CSG. The floating island is a julia
fractal. The foreground hills are bicubic patches. The trees are created by the
tomtree macro, though the shrubs are just spheres on sticks (I originally used
maketree shrubs but they took forever to trace and at this distance you can't
see the difference). And the man on the hill is a poser model (sorry), his robe
is made out of julia fractals.


