EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com
NAME: Glenn McCarter
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: "King of the Hill"
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0
TOOLS USED:
  sPatch (bezier patch creation)
  Moray (bezier patch creation, small CSGs)
  Paint Shop Pro (heightfields; convert image to JPEG)

RENDER MUSIC: Paul Simon "Graceland"
RENDER TIME: 18h 43m
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 90mhz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

And Brutus Proclaimed Unto The Others:
  "Lo, I am King
   of all I survey.
   Behold my Dominion!
   Kneel down before Me,
   and Ye may be spared
   my Mighty wrath!"

And Leviticus Thought To Himself:
  "Oh give me a break, wiseguy."


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Rather than explain all the technical details, allow me to describe the
creative process for this image.

I tossed around a dozen ideas for "Nature", ranging from marlin fishing
to an ant colony.  One of the ideas involved a watering hole: an oasis.  I
pictured a closeup view of an elephant or large cat drinking at the water's
edge.  But I immediately ran into a problem with this: a closeup view
looking downwards at the water couldn't possibly capture the full animal.
I hit upon a clever solution: just show the tip of the elephant's trunk
slurping up water.  The rest of the elephant would only be visible as
reflections in the water.

The rest of the scene would then show surrounding details: small plants,
rocks, and a few bugs or birds.  Then I thought of adding a lizard or
salamander.  The lizard would be sitting on a rock, watching the elephant
drink.  I liked this, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized
that the lizard itself, not the elephant, would be the focal point of the
scene.  The elephant became redundant, unnecesary.  Can you see the final
image developing?

To include a more interesting background, I tilted the camera upwards
in my mind's eye.  I added a hillside, and changed the static water
into a running stream.  This allowed me to give the scene a foreground,
middle, and background, as well as to keep the scene lively with chaotic
diagonal lines instead of horizontal/vertical.

Finally, I added lots of overhead vegetation, creating interesting
shadows but keeping the lizard in sunlight.  The accompanying story
became self evident.

This process took about three weeks.  The next month was spent modelling
and rendering.

--
Ok, a few technical details: almost the entire scene is made with height
fields and bezier patches.  Because of the huge memory requirements of
this scene, it was rendered as three layers:  the background, which was
then used as an image map in the main scene, which was then used as an
image map for the foreground rendering.  The rendering time shown above
is for the main scene.
For a complete description of the technical details, see the file
readme.txt in the zipfile.
