TITLE: Fire and Water
NAME: Reuben Pearse
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: dooby@breathemail.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.pearse.co.uk
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fireandw.jpg
ZIPFILE: fireandw.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPov 0.6a

TOOLS USED: 
    Isowood Include File (version 0.2) by Christoph Hormann, Blobman
Studio by Peter Houston, Paint Shop Pro 5.1 - for JPEG conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    56 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 800 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The image depicts a scene from the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
of the Lake-town being attacked by Smaug the dragon.

"...Then Bard drew his bow-string to his ear. The dragon was circling back,
flying low, and as he came the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered
his great wings..."

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Water and Sky
=============
The water and sky is based on code by Marc Schimmler
(which was posted to povray.text-scenes-files on 13/07/2000)

Dragon
======
The red dragon is a model developed by Rune S. Johansen (http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk/).
The good thing about this model is that you can articulate the dragons limbs and
wings.

Jetty
=====
I first made a small section of the jetty which consist of planks
(Wood_Plank_02) and wood cylinders (Wood_Cyl_01) from the Isowood Include
File.
I then repeated this section, using a while loop, to make the full length jetty

Wooden Houses
=============
These are made from the plank object (Wood_Plank_02) from the IsoWood Include
File. Using a series of while loops and incremental offsets I was able to make
the house frontage. To make the side walls I first created a platform of
planks, rotated them to be vertical and then used CSG difference to subtract
some boxes from the wall to make the angled corners - I was then able to place
the 2 sides of the roof.

Bard (the archer figure)
========================
Bard was made using BlobMan Studio (by Peter Houston). I had to create a new
archer "pose". Bard's costume is an adapted version of the Hoplite costume
definition file by Ulrich von Bek. I replaced the helmet with one I found on
POV Objects (http://www.povworld.de) by William D. Hayden.
The bow that the archer is holding is a torus chopped in half (I briefly
experimented with Chris Colefax's Bend Include file - but didn't get very
far!).
The arrow is made of 5 cylinders.

Dragon flame and fire
=====================
The dragons flame and fire effects are based on the Flame-Thrower code by H.E.
Day (can be found on the POV Objects website - http://www.povworld.de) This
code creates the flame effect by placing media inside a hollow cylinder.
However I kept getting a "banding" effect (especially on the dragons flame) as
the light was not passing through the cylinder (I presume this is what was
happening - I haven't done much with media!). To reduce the "banding" effect on
the dragons flame I changed the media container
object from a cylinder to a cone.

Moon
====
The moon is a white disc with a pigment to give it dark bits
I then pointed 3 spotlights at it.

Other comments
==============
As I this is quite a dark scene I had to play around with the assumed_gamma
setting as I had problems getting the brightness of the picture right. I hope
the final image is viewable enough! 

I was hoping to add some more people to the scene (such as people escaping from
Lake-town in boats) but I ran out of time.