TITLE: Something Wicked This Way Comes
NAME: Alexandre Dorion
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: alexandre.dorion@rogers.com
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Light and Fog
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: somethin.jpg
ZIPFILE: somethin.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.5, POVTree 1.5, Blobman

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 8 minutes 22 seconds (4102 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    HP Compaq dc7100, Pentium-4 3.2GHz, 1GB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The phrase "Something Wicked This Way Comes" originates in Shakespeare's play
Macbeth. So in keeping with the time-period, I wanted to show a foggy and cold
scene with Elizabethan or Medieval buildings lit with lanterns, and something
emerging from the fog.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Houses: I exported 3 different medieval houses created by Thomas de Grootin in
Moray. I glued them together and with the ultra-wide camera, it creates a nice
perspective image. 

Trees: I used POVTree to create these leafless trees. Both trees are the same,
just scaled and rotated to look different.

Figure: I used Peter Houston's Blobman macro to create a figure wearing the
sample clothes, then I hid him in the fog beside/behind the building.

Lights: These are tiny area lights inside the yellow glass of the lanterns along
with spheres to enhance the reflections on the glass. The soft shadows on the
house and ground work really well, but I'm not satisfied with the light source.
I would have liked to create a glow, sparkle or halo, but I found that using
media{interior} within atmospheric media like fog created voids. Anyone have
any suggestions/hints?

Fog: I used constant fog for hiding the background and ground fog for over the
cobblestones. High turbulence for the ground fog made it lumpy in some spots.
The perspective from the wide-angle camera also makes the fog angle upwards a
bit.

... and a little bit of focal blur, which I find does a better job than standard
anti-aliasing.

A.



