TITLE: Phoenix Eyrie
NAME: Angela Perry
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: aperry@financialfusion.com
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: phoenix.jpg
ZIPFILE: phoenix.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, PhotoShop 3

RENDER TIME: 
    10 minutes 37 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 333Mhz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


High inside a quiescent volcano, in a nest of fire and ice, the phoenix egg
sparkles in the moonlight. Its mother, eternally alert, watches the night sky
with keen eyes. Without warning, the darkness begins to deepen and press in
upon the pair in the nest. Disturbed, the phoenix lifts her head, then spreads
her wings and calls anxiously to the eclipsing moon.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This entry is the realization of an idea I had when I first downloaded POV-Ray.
I wasn't planning to enter this round, but the topic fit my idea so well that I
couldn't resist. (This is probably text file 459 out of 712 entries that
contains the "I just couldn't resist the Fantasy theme" diclaimer.)

The phoenix's body, head, and feet are all made of blobs and CSG. After creating
several pathetic semi-pointy things, I was finally able to create the beak in
Moray. For my own sanity, I promptly eliminated any other ideas of using
bicubic patches.

The wings were built using two macros, a feather macro and a placement macro.
The feather macro (surprise) created the feathers, using spline sweeps and
sphere sweeps. The feathers are textured individually using a normal_map and
high ambient, shiny finish for the final appearance. The placement macro
calculated spline curves for each row of feathers, then placed the feathers
perpendicular to the curve at that point.

The nest was built by randomly selecting between 3 defined crystals, then
randomly placing them in a torus shape. The other scattered crystals were also
randomly placed using hf_height_at. The finish on these crystals tripled the
tracing time, which I didn't find out until it was almost too late... *whew*

The lava is made of two planes, one with a partially transparent texture that
shows the "glowing" plane of lava beneath. I tried a light-source in the lava,
but I finally got the glow on the mountains I wanted by using a filtering
ground fog.

I used two light sources, one for the moon and one for the phoenix. I tried
using looks_like with both sources, but the phoenix needed more illumination,
so I fudged a bit on the phoenix's source. It is located a few units in front
of the phoenix so the finish is visible.

Other than the objects mentioned above, the scene includes the egg (which
doesn't count, since the tutorial in POV-Ray gives you step-by-step
instructions) and the randomly placed glows around the phoenix's wings. Nothing
special about their creation.

If anyone happens to look at my source, I apologize for the mess. Finishing up
at the last minute didn't give me a chance to clean out all the notes to
myself, so I'll leave them in for the entertainment value and lovely green
highlighting :-)

Thanks to Matthew Corey Brown for the moon texture tutorial, Pascal Baillehache
for inspiration on the feather macro, and Tim Cuthbertson for the encouragement
and polite kick in the pants.

