TITLE: Dungeons & Dragons verses an arcade airforce
NAME: Leroy Whetstone
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: lrwii@joplin.com
TOPIC: fantisy mistic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dd_vrs.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

Povray 3.1g Windows


TOOLS USED: 

 jpeg covertion: Lview by Leonardov Haddad Loureiro
  Triangle mesh: David Sharp
  polygon & prizm: by me


RENDER TIME: 

 Parse: 23 sec. 
 Trace: 1 hour 28 min. 48 sec.



HARDWARE USED: 

Amd K6 500Mhz 128 Meg RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


 "Three of my best friends where killed in this place so I decided to destroy
it" said Captian Arcade.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  This is my eight entry. When I first read the subject the only thing that
stuck in my mine 
  was 'Think about dungeons and dragons...' I never got 'into' it. I had some
friends that where
  but we could never get togather to play. The one time I played the game was so
boring that
  at the end of the evening I killed my chareture off. My first thought was to
convay that idea by
  have a string of castels all looking alike stretching out to infinity. I did
that and it was 
  boring. It needed something, I just wanted to blow it up. So, I did. I really
had fun too!
   I've played a few computer adventure games.(Zelda and the like) They are
mostly what I call    
  "Search and Destroy" (find the key or what ever, kill the bad guys) 
  Thats what I did here, after I placed the castles and a few of the planes I
searched for things 
  to either blow up or drop or to change.
   I use the POV FILE functions to place objects with the RAND function in files
and then went 
  back and edit the files to get the look I wanted.  
  
   
SCENE :
 size: 800 * 600  
 antialias: Method 2 Thershold .5 Depth 2 Jitter 1 
 frame level objects: 9558

Objects:

 Lights: 2 White place far above the ground  

 Sky: one that came with POV
 
 Fog:  I used 2 fogs one almost black and one white. 
      both have fog_type 2, distance 50, fog_alt 3, turbulence 2 
      one has fog_offset .5, the other has fog_offset .75  
       When I frist started I played around with the fog and water until I got
some thing I liked.
             
 water: Hand made texure on a box with an IOR of 1.33
 
 Castels & forground land : The Castels, I started with an old castel I'd made.
Then I made 
                           8 different prims for cutouts and 10 different rubble
piles.
                           I use the RAND to place the rubble and cutout values
in a file.
                            The ground under each castle is a prism (intersected
with a box to
                           give the grass effect) and a height field. When I
place a castel and
                           the ground under it, I rotated randomly both
independently.   
                            
 
 Men: All 83 men where place by hand. There are 50 different poses. They are
made of simple union
     of cylinders and a sphere. I made a POV program to ramdomly
     move the arms, legs, head and body and display 100 of them and choose the
best out of that
     100 and put their data in a file. I did that around 10 times before I had
the 50 I wanted.
     Even at that I had to modify, drop and create a few new men. I thought
about writing a 
     Qbasic program that would help but the time it'll take was better spent on
other things.
     Now that I'm through with this picture I'll write something.     
 
 Smoke: I first started with a union of 3 spheres one inside the other each with
a different 
       texture for each. I Randomly place the spheres inside a cone without the
cone showing
       and the spheres scale to the height of it location in the cone.
       I made 8 differnt smoke objects this way. I place them randomly around
the castels and 
       saved their data in the same file as the Castels data. I use this smoke
to edit the file.
       later when most of the other object where set I decide to try to improve
this smoke.
       I tried to use media by itself in clear spheres . I tried using BLOBs. I
tried different
       combination (of the above). I fianally settled on using one sphere as a
base randomly
       place as before but using merge, media and putting a pigment over the
whole thing.    
 
 Dragons: Are another old project off mine. All had to do was scale and place
them.
         The dragons by the wall are older and wiser. I like to think of the
dragon up front
         as a baby just wanting to play.(That's why I didn't blow him up.) 

 Airplanes: All 17 where made from modifying a plane in Triangles by Davis
Sharp.There are 240 
           smooth triangles. All where place by hand. 


 Boats: made using one polygon per boat with black pigment.

Zip-File: Sorry abount not having a zip file. I tried, but I have 8 POV files, 8
PRIZM files,
         3 TXT files and 3 INC files mostly scatted in different directories.
When I gather them up
         in a directory to make a zip file I stopped when the size reach 454k
and I wasn't even half done.
         I don't like to give a ZIP files that's only has part of what is need
to do the scene. When I
         first started with POV I downloaded some that where and I never got
over IT. 


Epilogue: I really like doing this. I know I've said it before, but I really
did. When I place the men
         each had there own little story. If you look carefully you may see 6
men caring away three 
         of POV treasures.(colored RED, Green, Blue) And when I place the planes
I could all most feel
         the G-forces and trying to figure their target. I let my imagination
run free. It was better 
         than watching a movie or reading a book.
          I also learned a little. While working on this at one point I had
65,000 frame level objects 
         and a render time  of 2.5 hours.I just had the castles and smoke done
and a few planes placed
         then. Using MERGE for the smoke cut frame level objects in half and
also reduce the render time. 
          The only trouble I had was with the JPEG convertion. I still hate it.
I am never able to get
         my JPEGs looking the way I want. So if you see any artifacts you know
what cause them.
          
          Feel free to E-mail me with any comments and or suggests.



