EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
NAME: Peter Murray
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Dover Castle and the White Cliffs of Dover
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
COUNTRY: England
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1b4 Macintosh PPC
TOOLS USED: English Heritage video about Dover Castle
    Adobe Photoshop for painting heightfields, adding credits, JPEG conversion
	Graphic Convertor for converting PICT heightfields to GIF
    Deskdraw for sketching the idea
RENDER TIME: 0 hours 23 minutes  42.0 seconds (1422 seconds)
HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The White Cliffs of Dover with the castle, pharos and church
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The moral is: Pick your subject early, don't change your mind about the
viewpoints four times in the last three days, and don't keep tinkering
with the details in the hours before the deadline.

My original idea was very similar to my idea for the "Time" round (which
I didn't actually enter).  I intended to render an object representing
a landmark event in front of Dover Castle, a different sort of landmark.

Then I had some other ideas, and gave up on that one.

Then I went back to the Dover Castle idea, intending to show it as a
landmark in itself from a viewpoint matching that in an old photo, but
then it changed to a view of the White Cliffs of Dover seen from the
sea, and then.....

Ah, you don't want to know :-) .

The heightfield for this image was painted over an enlarged screengrab
of a plan view of this site, taken from the video mentioned under "Tools
Used".  I revised it a few times, and went back to the last-but-two
version because the last two revisions made it worse and even worse.

Every time I do something to it today, it seems to get worse!  I've gone
back to an earlier viewpoint of the scene, as it was better than any
of the later ones.

There aren't nearly enough buildings on the top of the cliff.  From
left to right, there's the Norman keep of the castle, the Victorian
restoration of the old church of St Mary-in-Castro, and the Roman pharos
or lighthouse, repaired in mediaeval times.  None of these are more
detailed than they needed to be for this image - they may be less
detailed than they should have been!

The render finished about 1:10am, which is late enough that I can't
cope with yet another render tonight, even at 23 minutes a render.  I've
just realised how I could have incorporated the credits into the scene
:-( .  And I've realised what caused the odd-coloured patch at bottom
right :-( .

Background info on the landmarks:
1 The White Cliffs have been there for ages and ages and ages!

2 The Pharos was built in Roman times, presumably in the first century AD,
and was repaired in the Middle Ages.

3 The church basically dates back to Anglo-Saxon times but was extensively
restored in the 19th century.

4 There was a hill fort on the cliffs in the Iron Age, before Caesar tried
to invade Britain in 55BC.  The Normans strengthened whatever Saxon
defences were there in the late 11th century, and then built a new keep.
It was updated in the 16th century to take cannon, and more improvements
followed, up to the addition of machine gun nests during the Second World
War, plus an underground command post, and underground bunkers during
the Cold War.  It's therefore been a military site for over 2000 years,
and this picture doesn't do any of that justice :-( .

Oh, the heightfield is about 300K so I haven't included it in the zip
file.