TITLE: Nightfall
NAME: Steve Reeves
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dormammu@erols.com
WEBPAGE: personal page http://www.erols.com/dormammu
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nightfal.jpg
ZIPFILE: nightfal.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV Ray 3.0 for DOS

TOOLS USED: 
    I used several
Moray for DOS, the Lens Effect & Galaxy INC files by Chris Colefax, Height Field
Lab by John Beale and
 a Text Editor

RENDER TIME: 
    About 1 hour, 50 minutes in a DOS Shell from Windows 3.1

HARDWARE USED: 
    486/66DX2 with 16 megs of memory

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is a night scene.. you can see the lamp posts leading your way to the
observatory, and a beautiful
night sky scene.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This was by far the most complex image I've ever created.. and, it isn't all
that complex when compared
to past IRTC Winning Images.  Anyway, I started out one day thinking, "I should
make another entry
for IRTC .. my moonsrr image was pretty weak" .. so, I decided to depict a scene
from Isaac Asimov's
famous story "Nightfall" .. it would be near the end, when the populace of the
planet, driven insane by
lack of light, sets everything they can find on fire in a desperate attempt to
produce light.  Then I hit a
snag.  I can't ray trace people OR flames.  I messed around with Lens Glares and
such, but didn't have
any luck in making anything that even remotely resembled a fire.  So, I gave up
on that, but kept the name 
as "Nightfall" for my picture.  So, I started clean and went to the trusty
Height Field Lab generator by 
John Beale and produced some terrain.  I loaded this up in Moray and scaled it
properly, then I made
a simple observatory consisting of a sphere (as the dome) and a superellipsoid
as the base.  Then I 
realized the lighting really stank.  So, I created a new file and carefully
modelled a Lamp Post.  The
Post itself consists of 2 Toruses, 4 cylinders, and two sweeps.  (Somehow, POV
Ray calculates that
to be a total off 500 or so objects -- don't ask me.)  So, this took be about an
hour to model properly.
(Don't laugh at me over that, please.)  Then I copied the object into my main
Nightfall scene, and quickly
made 6 lamp posts, which created a horribly large amount of light, so I killed 2
of the posts and was much
happier with my results... then I pulled out Chris Colefax' Lens Effect and
Galaxy INC files, and coded
in a Lens Glare effect for the two front most lamps, and tossed in a random
galaxy sky sphere.  I like 
both these INC files quite a bit, and will be likely makingmore pictures with
them in the future.  Then I
decided to finish work on the observatory.  I resized the sphere a bit until it
looked good on top the base.
(btw, the Sphere was originally supposed to be a "stand in" for a dome created
via the Geodome utility,
but I decided to go with a plain sphere last second.) And then I made the
telescope, which is merely
a few cylinders of decreasing radius put on top of each other.  The lamp post is
a big CSG object, and I
was going to make the observatory a CSG object, but decided against it.  For the
height field, I tossed
together a texture which was suppose to look like dirt, but doesn't even come
close... I think it's cooler
looking anyway.

