EMAIL: albiaprime@aol.com
NAME: Hugh & Anne Gregory
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Acropolis
COUNTRY: CANADA
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/agre108/crafts/sagewood.html
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, Plant Studio, Tree Designer, 
            sPatch, 3D Win, Paintshop Pro Demo
RENDER TIME: 30 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 160 Mhz, 40megsRAM; PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

She stood intact like an immortal giant for more then 20 centuries, with
standing earthquakes, and the ravages of the weather, watching history
occur as conquering armies came and went, governments rose and fell and
a city grew around her flanks.

Then disaster struck.  She was being used as a powder magazine when
a shell struck and the whole place exploded.

The interior was destroyed but the outer columns and parts of the interior
survived.  Today, she still stands tall, a proud and silent memorial to the
ancients who built her, an icon of a once mighty civilization.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This is my second and our first joint IRTC entry.  My husband contributed
the engineering work done to ensure that the Parthenon was to proper scale
and that everything was in it's proper place.

Our reference for detail were the photo's and video we shot visiting Athens
in 1997 on our honeymoon.  Also of assistance were a series of slides taken
25 years earlier by my husband, when as a young student he first visited
Athens, Greece as a part of educational student group touring historic sites
around the Mediterranean aboard the school ship SS Uganda. So for those who
are interested here is how we built "The Acropolis".

When we saw the topic for the January-February 2000 competition we were both
inspired, but in different directions.  My husband had planned to build
the ruined castle we visited in Scotland in '95.  I was inspired by the
large print of us standing infront of the Parthenon that hangs in our living
room and he came home from work one day to find the outline of the Parthenon
complete with columns awaiting him in a Moray model.

Inspired, he built brick by brick a detailed floor (including cracks through
which the grout can be seen, if you're close enough) and the interior walls,
again rows of individual bricks.

I built the lintels that top the exterior columns and decorated them.  Then
I added Friezes on the front made in Moray as Beziers.

Next came the Acropolis mountain plateau upon which to sit our Parthenon.
Experimenting again, I downloaded "sPatch" off of the net and built my first
mountain. This I saved as DXF file, which I converted, to a Moray UDO with 3D-Win.

My husband then used the Leveler Demo to make the mountains that surround
Athens for a back drop.

Finally, we did the interior columns and with differences built a ceiling to
cover over the interior of the Parthenon.

Having mounted our completed Parthenon temple atop of the Acropolis, we then
proceeded to destroy it.

I scattered the columns on the south side and took apart some of the lintel,
tumbling pieces across the ground, just like on the actual site itself,
as we guessed it must have looked just after the gun powder explosion and
before modern day restoration work started.

My husband then took the interior roof we both worked on and exploded
it across the entire hill top.  It took him several days to get the roof
pieces in place so that they were on the ground or stuck into it, rather
then below or above it.

Finally while my husband built the cliff top wall and the access pathway
I used Plant Studio to make the shrubs that dot the plateau.

To complete "The Acropolis" we again employed a large diameter hollow sphere,
coloured sky blue with a Plain inserted one-third the way down from the top,
painted with a modified Caribbean Sky, again rescaled to produce the look of
bands of clouds.

The 800 by 600 BMP took over 30 minutes to render on POV using my husband's
Pentium II - 350.  The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with the Demo
Version of Paint Shop Pro I downloaded off the internet set to 6% compression
to get the file down under the IRTC maximum file size of 250kb,.
 
We Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright
                 "The Acropolis" is 
Copyright(c)2000 Hugh & Anne Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.