TITLE: Winter at Raven's Keep
NAME: Bill Bruedigam
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: williamb@thirdroad.com
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ravenskp.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 5

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel PhotoPaint 9, Bryce 5

RENDER TIME: 
    28 54

HARDWARE USED: 
    900 MHz Athlon, 768 meg ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The gray and cold of Winter has engulfed the world, and even the ravens have
left this place.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Crumbling walls: are heightfields created in PhotoPaint as square blocks of
different levels of gray.  I then copied each heightfield , and without moving
it made it smaller, then just a bit taller than the original to get the ice on
top of the walls.  The ice heightfields were heavily "eroded" to keep them from
just being a flat block laying on top of the wall.  

The trees: Bryce trees with so many tweaks I wouldn't know where to start.  I
tend to lean towards more gravity, of course no leaves, tweaks on all sizing
and angles; from branch start angles to quantity to size, and of course
textures with more bump than the ones that come with the trees.

The gate: simple, just a collection of cylinders, torus and cones.  The texture
is a rust texture with the colors altered and the bump increased for more
realism.  Again, the textures that come with the program fall well short of
realism, but the built in editor makes it very easy to create new, more "real
world" textures.

The snow drifts; simple heightfields.

I spent most of my finishing time on the sky and the atmosphere, trying not to
get too dark, but to have a Winter gray feel to the air.  A light fog reaching
into the edges of the scene, but not overwhelming it to the point of being
markable.  Haze was pointless since the walls block the view of the horizon.

I was very careful to not let the tree limbs penetrate and of the objects they
were close to.  Not the gate, the tree limbs nicely fall to either one side or
the other.  That close up, the live going into the gate would have totally
blown the whole feel of the place.

All of the textures are variants of Bryce textures using the built in texture
editor.  I tend to lean more towards increased bump heights, more refraction,
and some color variations to create more realistic textures than those that
come with the program that seem almost plastic.

There was no post processing other than conversion to jpg (and of course jpg
compression of 3% to get below the 250k size limit).

