home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- EMAIL: ptdawson@voicenet.com
- NAME: Paul T. Dawson
- TOPIC: School
- COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
- TITLE: "Zeltar-7 Technical School"
- COUNTRY: U.S.A.
- WEBPAGE: http://www.voicenet.com/~ptdawson
- RENDERER USED: POV-Ray(tm) for Windows Version 3.01.borland.win32
- TOOLS USED: DOS Edit, PhotoFinish, Coffee
- RENDER TIME: 2 Hours 44 Minutes 24 Seconds
- HARDWARE USED: AMD 486-120 with 20 megs RAM
- IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A school for creatures on another planet!
-
- DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
-
- For this round, I had three design goals:
- 1. Have fun.
- 2. Use a few carefully chosen colors.
- 3. Make up a completely imaginary planet / scene.
-
- The idea for the little, um, creatures, came from the photos of
- the so-called "Face on Mars". Since those fellows needed bodies
- to travel around, I gave them some little rolling trash cans (?),
- with sine wave arms. Then I built some elevated roadways for them
- to roll around on.
-
- The school started out as a box, then I added "tiles" made from a
- hand drawn height_field. The antennas on the roof are made with my
- nested loop tree file. The fence around the school has spiral things
- made from triangles (they are JPG blurred to near invisibility).
-
- The roadways also have lots of triangles. Unfortunately, the system
- I used to position the sections caused fatal errors in DOS POV-Ray.
- A quick switch to the excellent Windows version solved that problem.
- Please do NOT try to run this file with POV for DOS - it won't work!
-
- The planet "floor" and the surrounding mountains are done with several
- height_fields. One height_field is a TGA, created by POV. I included
- the source file (not the TGA) for that one in the ZIP. The other
- height_fields and image_maps are hand drawn (all included in the ZIP).
-
- There are over TWO MILLION triangles in the scene! 8-) It uses about
- 12 megabytes of POV memory.
-
- There is one little technical detail worth mentioning. In the source,
- there are the usual "Scene Switches" at the top, to turn individual
- objects on and off. I added a "fake" setting for some objects, which
- gives a simple shape, like a box or cone, instead of the real, "final"
- object. This speeds up parsing and tracing, during scene testing.
-
- Oh, it's called "Zeltar-7" just to be last on the alphabetical list!?!
-
- Thanks for reading all this,
- Paul T. Dawson
- April 30, 1997
-
-
-