
How To Recreate This Image
--------------------------
1. Render Background.pov
   This produces output "Background.png"
2. Render Dominion.pov - the main scene
3. Render Foreground.pov to make out-of-focus foreground


How The Scene Was Created
-------------------------
I started with the background, and worked my way forwards.
This was like three projects in one: the Background, the Main Scene,
and the Foreground.

The Background
A heightfield was sketched in Paint Shop Pro, and became the distant
mountains.  This was textured, then a ground fog was added.  Since a
ground fog in POV-Ray cannot be translated, everything else in the scene
has been translated high above the fog.
The same heightfield, with small modifications, is used for the distant
jungles covering the hillsides.  This heightfield has certain areas
depressed, allowing the mountain heightfield to "poke through" the
jungle heightfield.
This was fully rendered, then used as an image_map backdrop to the main
scene, in order to reduce the memory requirements.  The main scene has
a huge number of memory-intensive bezier patches.

The Main Scene
The lizards were made in sPatch, including their eyes which were created
in a separate layer in sPatch to allow them to be exported separately, and
have their own texture.
The big rock is just a distorted set of bezier patches made with sPatch.
The running stream was tricky.  First, I started with a plane made in
sPatch as bezier patches.  These patches were manipulated to give a
rough surface to the plane.  But this was very render-intensive, so I
looked for a better way.  I ended up using a randomized "field" of blobs.
The bubbles floating on the stream surface were groups of spheres, made
with the Moray modeller.
Three methods were used to create the vegetation: the grass-like weeds
were made as a CSG of primitive objects.  The overhanging leaves were height
fields.  And the remaining trees and stems were bezier patches, made in
sPatch.
Several simple trees were placed behind the camera, in order to cast shadows
on the objects in the main scene.

Texturing was done separately.  Because of the abundance of height fields,
blobs, and bezier patches, nearly all surfaces in the scene are very rough.
To verify that the shapes were correct, I used simple, plain textures at
first.  This allowed me to judge the roughness, contours, geometry, and
shadows of the objects in the scene.

Later, I added the complex textures, many with color_maps to introduce
subtle color variations.


The Foreground
The out-of-focus foreground was done as the final rendering.
This allowed me to continue to reduce the object-count of the scene, and
therefore its memory requirements.  I created the foreground objects,
along with the (off camera) trees which cast shadows on them, then rendered
them against the image map of the main scene with its background.


