TITLE: The Gymnasium of Termessos
NAME: Nathan O'Brien
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: no13@no13.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.no13.net
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 13ruins.jpg
ZIPFILE: 13ruins.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV

TOOLS USED: 
    Autocad, Texture Magic, home made Autolsp routines, Plant Studio,
Paintshop Pro, a Gilles Tran tree.

RENDER TIME: 
    8 Hours (includes 6 for parsing)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 500. 1 Gb of swap space

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This image is based on a several photographs I took while on holiday in Turkey.
The scene is of the Gymnasium at Termessos. Termessos is this amazing ruined
city on the top of a mountain. It stood out among the ruins I visited in Asia
Minor because it was completely over grown and had little restoration work. All
the others had been extensively excavated and restored.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The buildings were drafted in Autocad. I then used an Autolsp routine to export
the information to a series of POV macro statement that created the individual
blocks.

The mountain range was painted in grey scale in Paintshop Pro. It has a simple
slope texture applied.

The mounds and rocks on the foreground are another macro. Some of the plants
used were created in Plant Studio. The mound macro used the trace, min_extent
and max_extent functions of MegaPOV to first locate the boulders on the mound,
and then locate the plants in the spaces between the boulders. The boulders are
a simple blob macro as is the basic mound. The trace function allowed me to
prevent nasty errors with plants growing out of rocks. Unfortunately this did
not work with the building on the right hand side. There is a bit of grass
growing through parts of a column. I ran out of time to eliminate this error.

All textures were created using Texture Magic. An oldie but a goodie. The scene
if finished with a naked Gilles Tran tree. After all I did take the pictures in
winter and all the trees were bare. Only the weeds seamed to be doing well.

Full source code is included I hope. Any omissions just email me.

