TITLE: Hector and Andromache
NAME: Douglas C. Eichenberg
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: douge@nls.net
WEBPAGE: www.getinfo.net/douge
TOPIC: Mythology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: de_mytho.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    NuGraf/PolyTrans; Rhino; Poser; Picture Publisher; XFrog; Vue
D'Esprit; AutoCAD; PoseRay; UV-Mapper Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    see below

HARDWARE USED: 
    p3 1.5 512

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Based on the story of Hector and Andromache. Hector was
called back to war with the Greeks, where he was killed by Achilles.  Later,
the Greeks sacked Troy via the Trojan Horse, killing his wife and son also. 
There have been a number of paintings based on the story, by artists such as
Giorgio de Chirico, Maignan, and Jaques-Louis David.  Sometimes they portayed
the death of Hector, and sometimes the parting of Hector and Andromache; I
chose the latter.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The figures were made and posed in
Poser, exported as 3DS models, and imported into Rhino for positioning.  I
reduced the triangle count on Hector and Andromache in Rhino to reduce the
number of cylinders to a reasonable amount.  Then I converted to PCM format and
rendered via Chris Colefaxes PCM.mcr.  Originally, I had written a macro to
connect all the triangle centers into a spline and create a sphere sweep
through them, but I ran into a bug in sphere sweeps that caused an exception
violation (it would have looked like a mess of twisted copper wire). 

The armor on Hector is a mix of meshes I found on the internet, and some tweaks
and additions done in rhino.  The hair on the plume was done with my MayaFur
macros.  The chainmail skirt was modelled in rhino with a handpainted texture. 
I created an alpha map in photoshop for it (when rendered larger you can
through between the links, but it doesn't show so good at 800*600).  For the
shield I found a decent image of a coin on the internet, then imported it into
autocad and traced it's outline in polylines, extruding them and rounding the
edges off.  Then I UV-mapped the texture with UV-Mapper Pro.  The glare coming
off the shield was done with Chris colefaxes lens effects macro.

The walls and floors are isosurfaces positioned with a wall macro I wrote a
while back.  The vases are from various model collections I have, with textures
and bump maps from the Metal Disc (most of the metal textures in this image
were made from the Metal Disc).  The window frames were modelled in autocad and
uv-mapped in uv-mapper.

The grass was done with Gilles Trans MakeGrass macro, and positioned onto 2
isosurfaces with the trace routine.  The plants and flowers were done with
XFrog, exported as obj models, and converted to mesh2 format with PoseRay.

Andromaches halo used a couple different macros.  The main part of it is
actually made of blobs, and the gems and spheres were done with a separate
macro.

The murals along the back wall were made by importing large digital photos into
autocad and tracing the outlines with polylines, then extruding the joined
polylines into a surface.  Missing chunks, and large knicks and dings, etc.,
were CSG subtracted from the surfaces, and then they were exported as 3ds files
and cleaned up in NuGraf/Polytrans.  Then the textures were UV-Mapped with
UVMapper Pro.

Lighting was done with a couple of macros I wrote.  Fill lighting is from a
rectangular array of non-shadowcasting point lights with some random variance
in color and intensity.  The key lights (shadow casters) and all the other
lights are made with area spotlights.  Most of them are in light groups keyed
on specific objects.  For example, one for each plant, one for Hector, one for
Andromache, etc.  The macro takes an object as one of its arguments, then
calculates the light_fading based on distance from the object found via the
trace function.  By turning on one variable, it generates a cone showing the
actual location and size of the area spotlight that will be generated for
fine-tuning.  The shadows can be adjusted by varying the size and density of
the area light part of the light and the falloff angle of the spotlight part.

The sky was done in Vue d'Esprit and then mapped onto a planar surface in the
background (with ambient 1.0 diffuse 0, etc.).

For any triangle meshes, I ran them through NuGraf/Polytrans for smoothing.

Many details simply aren't visible here because the image was rendered so small
(it was designed to be rendered at 4800*3600 or larger, but it would never have
finished in time to make the deadline).  The flower petals and leaves actually
have crinkles and folds built into the triangle meshes, and look very realistic
at full size, and the texture maps are scans of the real thing. The window
glass has dirt smudges on it.  Almost everything, with the exception of the
tiles, has a unique bump map applied.  The window frames, in particular, look
very nice at full size.  Also there are stains under the windows and running
along the walls near the grass.  The young girl models have chips and knicks in
them, as if made of cement.  The skull has tiny cracks and missing flakes on
it.  The gems in the halo are all reflective and somewhat translucent, and have
faceted shapes. The blob part of the halo looks much nicer full size... it
tends to sort of blur together in smaller renderings.  The isosurfaces making
up the soil beneath the grass actually looks like soil, with smalls clumps etc,
and when rendered larger it shows through between the grass in some areas.

I'm probably missing something while writing this.  Someone lent me the Firefly
series on DVD and I'm watching that as I write.  Any questions feel free to
e-mail me.