TITLE: The Lair of the Demilich
NAME: Michael Shevlin
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: shevlin@uic.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.uic.edu/~shevlin/
TOPIC: Mythology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: demilich.jpg
ZIPFILE: demilich.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Gimp

RENDER TIME: 
    6 hours, 14 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Throughout the land, tales spread of evil rising; people were disappearing and
turning up 
dead and mutilated days later.  Livestock died, crops withered, and the very
daylight 
itself appeared to dim.  The town council called a meeting, and I volunteered to
go along 
with the expedition to put an end to this evil.  We journeyed to the nearby
mountains, the 
center of the darkness, and into the ancient ruins there.  Legend spoke of a
powerful 
spellcaster that used to inhabit this once-great castle; now it appeared as
though nothing 
but dust and rats reigned.  In the center of the tunnels beneath the ruins was
an ancient 
burial chamber.

We pried open the chamber door and were confronted with a terrible skeletal
visage, its 
empty eye sockets burning crimson with malice.   It was a demi-lich, a creature
of absolute 
evil and unspeakable power.  Sustained by eternal undeath, it had been waiting
here for 
millennia, gathering power for its dark schemes.  It turned its gaze toward us,
and we knew 
no more.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Most of the small objects in the scene are bicubic patch objects created with
sPatch.  The 
skull was a mesh that I found online about a year ago, but the site hosting it
has since 
evaporated.  To the best of my knowledge, it was public domain.

I created a stone block through the creative use of CSG with height fields. 
Since a single 
block, randomly rotated has 24 different possible orientations ( 6 faces * 4
rotations 
each ), I figured that I could get away with only a single block, which is
duplicated 
somewhere on the order of 2000 times.  The advantage of using CSG and height
fields over 
isosurfaces is evident in the render time.

The fires are accomplished with multiple media with multiple densities each. 
The flame 
structure comes from the marble pattern while the overall structure of the fire
is 
constrained with a stretched spherical pattern (in the case of singular fires)
or gradient 
and wood (in the case of the ring of fire over the runes). 

The pile of sulfur on the front right table was a trick to make.  While I didn't
need it 
to avoid intersecting grains (at this detail level, you can't make out a single
grain, let 
alone see if it's in the middle of another), I did need to figure out how to
pile all of 
them up in a reasonable manner.  I found that working with cylindrical
coordinates ( r, 
theta, and y ) in this case was really helpful.  The nature of the coordinates
makes it 
easy to make circular shapes.  I came up with an algorithm that placed cubes
(for 
simplicity) in round layers where the radius of the layer was dependant on its
height; a 
square root type of function gave a nice pile shape.

The sparklies were placed in a similar manner to get them to swirl around the
skull. The 
sparklies are media objects; I tried playing around with various methods of
generating 
lens flare but found that they tended to bog down with that many of them in the
scene; the 
render time is much, much better using a bunch of tiny media-filled objects. 

The texture used on the shroud in the sarcophagus and the texture on the
tapestries in the 
background came from Paul Bourke's texture library at
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/texture/.  
The bunch of herbs on the rear right pedestal were generated with Gilles Tran's
excellent 
maketree macro.  The runes are text objects of the freeware Angerthas Moria font
by Morten 
Bek, individually rotated to fit the circle.

