TITLE: Encounter in the woods
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Insects & Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmwoods.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmwoods.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    MegaPOV 3.1g Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 

    POV-Ray's built-in editor (and MegaPOV's).
    Apple's MPW Shell editor.
    Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG.
REFERENCES:
    Collins Gem Guide to Insects by Michael Chinery (HarperCollins
0-00-458818-5)

RENDER TIME: 

Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes  28.0 seconds (28 seconds)
Time For Trace:    0 hours 48 minutes  16.0 seconds (2896 seconds)
    Total Time:    0 hours 48 minutes  44.0 seconds (2924 seconds)
    (anti-aliasing on: default settings)

HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    The adventurers are attacked by the evil mage's giant spiders.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I remember various giant insects and spiders as monsters from when I used to
play roleplaying games a lot, and the idea of a group of adventurers being
attacked by giant spiders in the wilderness came from that.  (And the Hobbit,
of course....)

After looking at so many pictures of fortresses while judging the previous
round, I wished I'd done something like an evil mage's tower - so I quickly
built one to use as a background object.  Since it was done so early in
the round, I had plenty of time to add more detail to it as more ideas
occurred to me, so it's actually had more attention than many of the
foreground objects :-( .

The spider was modelled on a Pisaura mirabilis, a wolf spider from the
section of the book that has details of arthropods that aren't insects.  It's
was modelled at about the right size, then scaled up to fight the adventurers.
Posing spiders, each with eight separate legs to adjust, is a pain!

The spiders would probably look Ok if they were larger in this image, but
the adventurers wouldn't, so I went for this composition.  Closeups of
the two human vs spider "duels" are on my webpage at
http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/wip/wip_beasts.html anyway.

The adventurers were in the Worship round, but have been posed differently
for this round.  They're facing away from the camera so you can't see how
bad they look!  I made hardly any progress with my newer version this
round, so they're the same old humanoids I used in the Laboratory round.

I tried making my own trees again, with better results than I've managed
before.  The main reason for doing this is the memory problems I've had in
the past with better-modelled trees, such as those by Gilles Tran.  My
macro fills an array with values that describe the tree, and writes it to
a file.  It needs a lot more work still, but by copying and editing the
definition in the file, I can make slightly different trees, which helps
when I need this many of them.  However, the trees still take up too much
memory - I kept having to reduce the number of trees I was using.  They
work reasonably well in a forest, anyway :-) .

I wrote another macro that scatters trees around, basically in a spiral, to
avoid the problem I've found in the past, when I've wound up using offset
rows of trees.  This macro (woodland.mcr) also knows where the path is, and
tries (too hard!) to make sure that no tree is planted on a path.  I was
intending to use MegaPOV to find the height of the heightfield for each
tree's position, but the code that worked for me a few weeks ago no longer
works - I'll probably realise why just after the deadline passes!

The large spiderweb visible at one side is just a simple shape that has
layered radial and onion textures.  Technically, there should be one spiral
thread, not concentric circles, but you can't see the web well enough for
it to really matter.

I had intended to include more objects, but since I had to reduce the number
of background trees in order to include the tower and the adventurers, there
didn't seem much point.  I had to reduce the number of trees again when I
tried to render a full 800x600 image (the official POV-Ray refused to do that;
this entry was therefore rendered in MegaPOV).  Next time, maybe I'll
really look into level-of-detail to choose between high- and low-quality
objects, which I didn't get round to this round.

ZIPFILE: (hopefully now unzippable on PCs without any problem!)
The main file:        
  pdmwoods.pov
  pdmwoods.ini
Macro and Include files
  woodland.mcr
  trees.mcr
  land_is.inc
  magetower.inc
  mystone.inc
  rtd3.inc
  rpger.inc
  polar.mcr
  matrix.mcr
  spdretc.inc
  woodsprops.inc
Costume Files for people
  guard.cst
Image maps?  No!  My other entry had a 3Mb zipfile due to my not thinking,
and including four PNG files, one of which was over 1Mb!  The heightfield
does use a PNG, but I learnt my lesson.  No PNGs in this zipfile.

