EMAIL: john@thegardiners.co.uk
NAME: John Gardiner
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Tower
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.6
TOOLS USED: Poser4 to create human figures. PoseRay to import figures into POV-Ray. Thumbs Plus to convert image to jpg.
RENDER TIME: 26h 35m
HARDWARE USED: 2.66 GHz Pentium 1.25G Ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A stricken tower is a centuries-old image that, so far as I know, first appeared in medieval woodcuts (divine retribution) and then as one of the trumps in the original Italian tarot cards. From that point it's open to all sorts of speculation and colourful theories, but from any viewpoint I think it's a wonderful depiction of sudden and unexpected downfall.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Grass from the Make Grass macro by Gilles Tran - March 1999. 

Most of the tower is a simple CSG object rendered with an image map created from a photo of a stone wall (and converted to a seamless tile using a paint program). 

The windows and door are edged with randomly sized shapes, mostly f_rounded_boxes with a little noise3D.

I used a noisy cone to cut the tower again and again to get the splits and lumps of masonry. Then added broken glass and a shower of stones.

The lightning had me stumped for a long while and I'm still not 100% happy with it. In the end I used a thin box with a pigment map (look in TheTower.pov). The flash at the top was done using media.

All the files are included except for the Poser meshes. If anyone does download and try the code, the main file is TheTower.pov, and I'd suggest commenting out the top line #declare highDef = true; at first.