TITLE: King Of Kings
NAME: Christof Rauchenberger
COUNTRY: Austria
EMAIL: christof.rauchenberger@chello.at
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: cr_king.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Poser 4, Moray 3.2, 3DWin, IrfanView 3.07 (JPEG conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    1h 51min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-166 with 32 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Most of you will know Shelley_s poem, but I include it here
just in case.

I once met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains, Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley 

I had a printout of 'Ozymandias' hung on a wall of my old flat for several
years. Despite its somewhat morbid subject matter, I REALLY like this poem,
because it calls forth such a striking, archetypal image, using less than half
a page of text. Cr_king.jpg comes quite close to the picture I imagined when I
first read it ten years ago. There are, however, two inaccuracies:

 - Ozymandias was the Greek name of pharao Ramses II (actually a Greek
transliteration of User-maat-re, one of Ramses_ many names). It stands to
reason that a statue he_d had made of himself would be in the Egyptian style,
not the Classical Greek I tried to do here.
 - By the same token, the inscription on the pedestal would not be in Greek, but
in hieroglyphics.

Nonetheless, this is the way I saw the scene ever since I read the poem, so I_ll
invoke artistic license on these points. Note that I don_t know any Greek (this
is also why there is just the name on the pedestal), so I have no idea whether
the spelling on the pedestal is correct. "It looks plausible to me" is all I
can bring forward in my defence.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I caught the 3D graphics bug about a month ago, experimented briefly with Poser
and Bryce, then came across Povray less than two weeks ago. I still know next
to nothing about textures, but I_ll start reading the manual Real Soon Now. I
first wanted to submit an entirely different image featuring alien ruins (
courtesy of sPatch), but I quickly found out that interesting-looking alien
ruins are not that easy to do. So I abandoned that project. Luckily I
remembered Ozymandias that evening, a subject which would be indisputably
on-topic (one of the problems with my alien ruins was that their ruined status
was not readily apparent because of their high-techiness), and which I already
had a firm minds-eye image of. The actual modelling was shamefully simple: The
statue is the standard Poser 4 nude man with curly hair, exported to 3ds format
and converted to Moray udo with 3DWin. The pedestal is a union CSG of two
cubes, which are themselves difference CSGs to bring off the chipped portion
and inscription. The inscription is a text object using the "Symbol" truetype
font found on every computer I_ve ever worked with. The sky is a sphere, the
ground is a plane (we  knew that all along, right?) I originally intended to
use a standard blue sky, but I like what I_ve got now much better.
At some point in the future (i.e. as soon as I actually know what I_m doing as
opposed to the "gee, I wonder what that button does" mindframe I_m in now), I_d
like to rework this image using a statue model I made myself. sPatch seems the
obvious candidate.
I realize that the 'Ozymandias' motif is a fairly obvious choice for this round.
This is my interpretation. There might be many like it, but this one is mine.

