TITLE: Warlock, Witch, Wizard Way

NAME: James Edward Gray II
COUNTRY: USA

EMAIL: raytracing@grayproductions.net
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jg_w3way.jpg
ZIPFILE: jg_w3way.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Carrara Studio 2.1


TOOLS USED: 
    Carrara and Photoshop 7.0.


RENDER TIME: 

        This version of the image took 5:50:54 to render followed by a mind
blowing
32 hours to enhance with the 3D Aura effect.  This was only because I rendered
it at four times the size I wanted it though, for the reason noted below.  A
complete render with 3D Aura effect at actual size takes under an hour.


HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual 533 G4 running Mac OS X


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        Welcome to Warlock, Witch, Wizard Way, home to all manner of
architectural
wonders for our mundane eyes to behold.  On the right, we have the Witch's
Tower.  As you can plainly see, she prefers landing on her balcony to more
traditional methods of approach.  She also enjoys the soothing sounds her moat
creates in the lower living quarters.
        To the left we can see a little of the Warlock's lawn art, complete
with
Smoking Dragon Fountain.  He scorched the whole yard last month in anger when
he
learned he had lost his long held and coveted Yard of the Month Award to a
fairy
a block over.  Fortunately, that catapulted him back to the top of the charts
and he is again the favorite for this month's award.  His house is not shown,
for good reasons.
        Finally, we have the newcomer.  The Wizard is hard at work constructing
his
castle near the hills.  Like all magic-users, he prefers a solid foundation of
crystal...  and, of course, just the right amount of magic!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        This is my first solo submission to the IRTC and my first big project
with
my new renderer, Carrara.  My main goal was to keep the image reasonable, so I
wouldn't have to get a divorce to get my entry in on time.  I also wanted to
explore Carrara, you know, learn a little.  And of course, it would be nice to
have fun while I'm doing it.
        My choice of topic furthers the fun goal, of course.  When I originally
read
the topic, I was strangely devoid of ideas.  I dismissed it as a dud and forgot
about it, or so I though.  In truth, I just kept generating ideas and finally I
began modeling the Witch's Tower.  I was doomed.
        Getting to the more technical stuff, most of the objects in this image
are
spline modeled.  For you die hard POV-Ray users out there, I would describe
that
as modeling a three dimensional object one dimension at a time.  It took me
some
time to get my head around that, but Carrara's spline modeler is quite robust
and it's now the first tool I reach for.
        A couple of objects, the fountain head and the wizard himself are
vertex
modeled.  To me, that's more like clay manipulation.  I can safely say I no
longer break out into hives when it's time to switch to the vertex modeler, so
I
do believe I'm making progress there.  I'm sure you can make anything with that
sucker, but I've got a long way to go shaping my vertex modeling skills.
        The terrain was made with Carrara's...  Ready for this?  Terrain
modeler!
That's a handy little guy good for just what the name implies and probably a
few
other yet undiscovered jobs, by me at least.
        Finally, this scene contains some good old fashioned primitives, a few
enhanced with Carrara's great range of modifiers.  I can't help it, I'm weak. 
I
love a good primitive.  I'm getting injections for it.
        The textures are almost entirely procedural shader trees, Carrara's
equal to
POV's texture block full of pattern functions.  I built them with the intensely
scientific method known as, "Fiddling with the sliders and buttons."  I love
Carrara's shader trees.  They are quite different from what I got used to using
in POV though and I have a long way to go before I master them.  Two textures
are actually texture maps, but hey I had to try out that too, right?  They're
sample textures from TextureWorld provided on the Carrara Studio 2 Content CD,
maps included in one of Carrara's default textures and a simple black and white
mask I created in Photoshop (these last two are parts of a single texture).
        Last, but far from least, this sucker is rendered with Carrara's killer
Global Illumination renderer.  That baby can draw, let me tell you!  It even
makes me look good.  I used Carrara's 3D Aura rendering effect for all the
magical glow.
        Unfortunately, that last bit was my problem child.  In what I expected
to be
the final render, the castle looked like it fell out of the jagged edge tree
and
hit every branch on the way down.  There is a known bug in Carrara that causes
3D Aura to undo its otherwise good anti-aliasing efforts.  Sadly, the only
solution I could find for this falls back to the old reliable Photoshop.  This
image was therefore rendered at four times the desired size and resized down
during the JPEG conversion for a kind of manual supersampling.  I relize this
is
a form of post processing, but I checked with the IRTC mailing list before
doing
it and learned that it is allowed by the contest rules.  It's in the Stills FAQ
if you would like to see documented proof of that.  Still, I wish I hadn't had
to do it.  Hopefully, Eovia will fix this soon or I'll get over my 3D Aura
obsession!

