EMAIL:jgregoir@eznet.net
NAME:Jeremy Gregoire
TOPIC:Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:Echoes of an Older Time
COUNTRY:United States
WEBPAGE:nada
RENDERER USED:Povray for Windows 3.1g
TOOLS USED: Moray for Windows 3.1, trees.inc
RENDER TIME: 8 minutes 27 seconds. (I LOVE my new computer!)
HARDWARE USED:Pentium III 733-Mhz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:  As you walk through the ruins of the citadel, a 
low fog swirls around you, and you begin to see what it must have looked like all
those many years ago when the citadel was at the height of its power.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I started by creating the "ancient" view of the scene in Moray.  Complete columns, arches, the fount,
etc.  There was even several objects (like torches and tapestries) that unfortunately didn't "ghost"
very well, and had to be cut out later.  Once I had the ancient scene set up, I copied it to another
file, and began to rip it apart.  That was almost as much fun as wrecking the real thing would have 
been! :)  The trees were created with the trees.inc include file created by Sonya Roberts.

Anyway, I made sure to leave the camera in the same spot in both scenes, and when I got the "modern"
view to look approximately the way I wanted it, I wen tback to the ancient image and proceeded to set
all of its textures to varying degrees of transparency.  Then I pasted the two files together and
rendered it.  I immediately discovered two things.  
  1. Ghosts should not cast shadows.  Oops.
  2. Povray REALLY doesn't like having two objects teh exact same size existing in the exact same spot.
     It seems to get confused as to which texture it should present as being the correct one.  The 
first test render was decidedly psychedelic.

  I shrank the ghosts each to about .999 their original size, which fixed #2, and can't really be
detected, at least not by my eye.  Then I turned off shadows in the image on the light sources.
I tried just shutting off the shadows on the ghost objects, but the shadows interfered with the image of
the juxtaposition of the two scenes, so they had to go.

Voila!  A ghost of the original, imposed on the modern ruin.