TITLE: Knight's day off
NAME: John Haiducek
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jhaiducek@tm.net
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING
JPGFILE: monster.jpg
ZIPFILE: monster.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        MegaPOV 0.5a



TOOLS USED: 


  -GIMP for Windows (it's surprisingly stable, contrary to developer's reports)
  -Hamapatch
  -Blob Man People by Peter Houston
  -MakeGrass macro by Gilles Tran
  -Lightning Include File by Jeffry Brickley and Bob Hughes


RENDER TIME: 


2d 09h 52m 05s



HARDWARE USED: 


        Pentium MMX 166 Mhz, 32 MB RAM, Windows 98



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It's the knight's day off, and the wizard is filling in. The smoky smell of
smoldering grass mingles with a faint smell of ozone as the fire-breathing
monster encounters fire of a different kind.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I mulled over the idea of dragons, considering even the possibility of a
pterodactyl-shaped dragon (so it wouldn't look to fat to fly), but I ended up
with a monster instead.

The dragon is modelled in Hamapatch, and the texture is a slope-dependent
texture-map. The eyes (barely visible) are based on the BlobMan include files.

The wizard is created using Peter Houston's Blob Man People include file. The
wizard's Costume Definition File is based on the sample file "croft.cdf".

The lightning was created using the Lightning Include File by Jeffry Brickley
and Bob Hughes. The include makes some really nice looking lightning, but it's
difficult to work with when you want the lightning to strike at an angle from a
specific source. I had to do a lot of trial and error before the lightning was
coming right from the wizard's hands.

The village houses in the background are CSG. I looked at some photos of old
European farmhouses and attempted to duplicate their essential features. They
have thatch roofs made with Gilles Tran's MakeGrass macro (that turned out to
be unnecessary since they're so far in the background, but the thatch is there
anyway.)

The burning barn is identical to the houses, except that the thatch roof is
gone, the plaster wall texture is replaced with the ash texture I used for the
ground,  pigment-mapped so the wall appears nearly burned away. The fire is a
spherical media.

The ground plane is textured with some grass textures I made a year ago,
modified appropriately. On top of the grass texture there are nine other
layers, for the patches of burning grass, the ashes, and some scratches  in the
dirt under the dragon's feet.

The field in the background was created with the MakeGrass macro. Also the
clumps of weeds on the ground were created with blades from the MakeGrass
macro, arranged in circles, and distributed on the ground with a version of the
MakePrarie macro that I modified to randomly adjust the position of the clumps
of weeds.

