TITLE: The 7 Columns of Mystics
NAME: Elias Pschernig
COUNTRY: Austria
EMAIL: elias@users.sourceforge.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.elias.f2s.com/pov/
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 7c.jpg
ZIPFILE: 7c.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay MegaPov 0.7 Raytracer by D. K. Buck et.al.

TOOLS USED: 
    This is 100% handcoded pov.

RENDER TIME: 
    20 hours 20 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Processor 933-Mhz-Pentium-4 RAM 348 MB-PC133

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    I liked the topic Fantasy and Mystics, and instantly fired
up
          megapov to start writing, without a certain topic in mind. (See the
          pbi newsgroup at news.povray.org about my "Entering IRTC" posting.
          http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/14173/)
          Using "Fantasy", I started adding stuff and tried creating a
"Mystics"
          scene - and there you are, now I even have a story for it: The 7
          columns were created by various mystical people to fight the bad Dark
          Druid, who built that ugly arch. Each column was planned to feature a
          different creature and theme, with the highlight of the picture being
          a spell in which all the different colors from the 7 columns would
          unite into a cool lighting effect. But I completely ran out of time.
A
          final version is due to be posted by me to pbi in 1 ot 2 years as
free
          time permits.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    Not much to say, it is 100% hand
          coded pov - There you have the reason for it staying unfinished as of
          now.
          
          The candles are type 3 media and are an improved version of my povray
          3.1 flame.inc include file. Originally they had all different colors,
          but i didn't like the colored look anymore after some time.
                    
          The fog is a simple scattering media, which for some reason
multiplied
          rendering time by a factor of 10. I guess I should have used a
smaller
          container for it? Please someone tell me this, or why it is so slow!
          
          The knight, dragon, spider (unvisible) and skull (barely visible) are
          all pure constructive solid geometry objects, made of intersecting
          spheres, cylinders, boxes and torii. The dragon was placed on top of
          the column with trace. (You wouldn't believe me if I told you how
much
          time I needed for any of those 4 objects)
          
          The columns are what took me the most (ridiculously much) time. I
          started with learning ISO-Surfaces for a week, just to find out
          that they were not useable at all for the purpose of large columns,
          with my poor(?) hardware. So I abandoned the idea and started writing
          lots of parsing code, and with a little help from the povray.newusers
          newsgroup managed to get quite some basic understanding of triangle
          meshes and vertex normals - Which I could use to create the wall in
          the back as well.
          
          The arch is just made of simple blocks - according to the topic idea
          it should stay in contrast to the rest of the image in just every
          aspect and thus will remain a simple block even in later versions
          (versions which I *will* do).
          
          I might have worked far more than 100 hours on this, counting in some
          nights before the monitor, unable to stop fiddling with some pov code
          parameters unless falling asleep over the keyboard :) Anyway, I liked
          creating this image a lot, and it's a shame I couldn't finish it yet.