EMAIL: chris_hormann@gmx.de
NAME: Christoph Hormann
TITLE: The Gatekeeper
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: chgate.jpg
ZIPFILE: none
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED:
   Photoshop for jpeg conversion
   HCR-Edit for gamma correction
   XEmacs/Internal WinPov-Editor for coding

   ClothRay: http://tofbouf.free.fr/clothray/index_en.html

   Gilles Tran's maketree and makegrass macro:
   http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources01.htm

   checkpat.inc:
   formerly http://www.koganet.ne.jp/~sylow/pov/utility.htm
   current availability unknown.

   IsoCSG library: http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/pov/ic/

RENDER TIME: 17.3 days
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1 GHz, 512 Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A traveler on a flying carpet on its way through a craggy landscape
towards a castle of alien look.  The 'gatekeeper' is guarding a
passage through the mountains.

Concerning the topic "Spectacular Landscapes", i think something
becomes 'spectacular' only by human judgment - nothing in nature is
spectacular per se.  So adding some human influence and presence to
the landscape seems only natural to me.  A structure in nature
seemingly resembling a human figure also is a central motive of human
appreciation of nature, just think of how human forms are recognized
in the moon, on the mars surface, in star constellations and
elsewhere and are a main source of mystery tales throughout history.

The flying carpet is an old symbol from the stories of "Thousand and
One Nights" (or "Arabian Nights"), a collection of tales from the
Arabic and Persian regions.

Some links concerning this:

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze33gpz/flcarpet.html
http://www.mfa.gov.tr/grupc/cj/cja/d1305.htm
http://www.al-bab.com/arab/literature/nights.htm
http://www.bartleby.com/16/
http://www.bartleby.com/65/n-/N-1001Nigh.html


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The terrain structure including the gatekeeper figure is modeled
with isosurfaces.  The gatekeeper's main form is created with blob
components using the IsoCSG library.

The carpet is created with isosurfaces too, both the main form as
well as the fringes. Its texture is completely procedural. The
umbrella is created with a macro i wrote and which i will probably
make available on my website when i have cleaned up the code.  It
is textured with the 'checkpat.inc' include file, the used cloth
structure normal resulted in some ugly moire pattern because i
could not afford higher quality antialiasing settings for the whole
scene and rendering only that part with better settings would be
against the rules.

The human figure is just several cloth patches draped over a blob
skeleton with Clothray.  The castle is classical CSG.

The grass, bushes and trees are made with makegrass/maketree.

The scene was rendered with full radiosity pretrace down to 2x2 and
'always_sample off' + raised error_bound during final trace.  None
the less there were still a lot of samples taken during final trace.