TITLE: Echoes of an Older Time
NAME: Jeremy Gregoire
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: jgregoir@eznet.net
WEBPAGE: nada
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fount.jpg
ZIPFILE: fount.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray for Windows 3.1, trees.inc

RENDER TIME: 
    8 minutes 27 seconds. (I LOVE my new computer!)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 733-Mhz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    As you walk through the ruins of the citadel, a
low fog swirls around you, and you begin to see what it must have looked like
all
those many years ago when the citadel was at the height of its power.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started by creating the "ancient" view of the scene in Moray.  Complete
columns, arches, the fount,
etc.  There was even several objects (like torches and tapestries) that
unfortunately didn't "ghost"
very well, and had to be cut out later.  Once I had the ancient scene set up, I
copied it to another
file, and began to rip it apart.  That was almost as much fun as wrecking the
real thing would have 
been! :)  The trees were created with the trees.inc include file created by
Sonya Roberts.

Anyway, I made sure to leave the camera in the same spot in both scenes, and
when I got the "modern"
view to look approximately the way I wanted it, I wen tback to the ancient image
and proceeded to set
all of its textures to varying degrees of transparency.  Then I pasted the two
files together and
rendered it.  I immediately discovered two things.  
  1. Ghosts should not cast shadows.  Oops.
  2. Povray REALLY doesn't like having two objects teh exact same size existing
in the exact same spot.
     It seems to get confused as to which texture it should present as being the
correct one.  The 
first test render was decidedly psychedelic.

  I shrank the ghosts each to about .999 their original size, which fixed #2,
and can't really be
detected, at least not by my eye.  Then I turned off shadows in the image on the
light sources.
I tried just shutting off the shadows on the ghost objects, but the shadows
interfered with the image of
the juxtaposition of the two scenes, so they had to go.

Voila!  A ghost of the original, imposed on the modern ruin.

