The Eye Of Ludor
Created/Written By Henry Chung for Computer Science 3710 - Computer Graphics - Spring 2007 Semester.

Ludor - Final Project Image
The Final Image.  Please click it to enlarge.  Took 15 minutes and 46 seconds to render the image.
Created using POV-Ray (Photon-Oriented Violet Ray...I mean Persistence Of Vision Raytracer!)
Final Image: 272 KB - Rendered using 1024x768 resolution with Anti-Aliasing at 0.3.
If the image is too bright, it is because my computer screen is configured to be very dark.  Please click here and see what I see, hopefully...!
Ludor - Before Fog
The image before the Fog Effect was applied.
The fog reduced the eye's brightness.
If the image is too bright, it is because my computer screen is configured to be very dark.
Please click here and see what I see, hopefully...!

There lies a tainted land,
Within the area of Lethbridge on the western side.
The desire for other's failures and pains,
This vile creature resides.

It sees everything,
Plunging the students of this land in constant fear.
Not a single soul who values their mind and soul,
Dares to go near.

The Eye of Ludor,
Was brought here by one man.
Who else could be more despicable,
Than the one who oversees that the University properly ran.

Ah yes, the Eye was a spying and punishing tool,
Catching all those who disobeyed the University's rules.
Then it devours all of its victims confidence and joy,
And mocks the blundering fools.

It mentally injects words,
Hazardous to those feeling down.
Attempts to push them over the edge,
And within their misery, they drown.

Once the mind is lost in hopelessness and doubt,
Extracting the soul is merely a simple task.
Leaving your body alive,
But your face expressionless much like a mask.

You cannot see the Eye of Ludor,
But you can feel that it's there.
Constantly taunting you make a great mistake,
Giving all an uneasy feeling with its gleeful stare.

University of Lethbridge Hill Structure
The University of Lethbridge Hill Structure.
Was taken by myself and served as a reference/guideline.
The Eye of Sauron
The Eye of Sauron.  From the The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Served as a reference/guideline.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Eyeofsauron.jpg#file

The Eye of Ludor - Description

The Eye of Ludor was inspired by The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, as well as the structure at The University of Lethbridge, the one on the hill just right outside of the University Library. Within The Lord of the Rings, there lies a land called Mordor, which is home of the Eye of Sauron; the dark lord within the story set out to plunge the land in darkness. The name Ludor is simply the first letters of “Lethbridge University”, followed by the last three letters of "Mordor".

The structure which holds the eye was created by taking a box, then using the difference command and other boxes and cylinders, the structure was created. In order to create the grainy texture of the stone, crand was used within the finish block. This part probably took the least time to do, except for that I had to spend hours playing with the perspectives and getting all the coordinates straight. That has been my primary problem within this entire project.  Orthographic perspective may of served me better, but I discovered that too late into the project and was not planning to change everything around just for it.

Next up was the eye. The eye consists of four spheres. Since POV-Ray doesn't seem to have a way to have smaller objects show up within a bigger object and not the bigger object just eat it up, I had to use a lot of difference commands in order to make that happen. Then, the textures also messed me up as I needed transparency and also the gradients weren't showing up as I wanted them to. All this together probably took the most time.  It was later solved by using Media and the ever so useful Hollow command.  Hollow just made the interior of the sphere hollow and the pigment Clear made it so no solid colour was covering the entire sphere thus not giving us a chance to see the interior.  Interior_Texture was used.  It basically applies pigments and other stuff which should be on the surface of the sphere or object and makes it seems like it's behind all the stuff going on within the object's interior.  That was very useful indeed!

After the eye was completed, the sky wasn't too challenging, especially with the sky_sphere object and plenty of tutorials on the Internet as well as the POV-Ray manual. However, one thing to note about the sky: it uses the skies.inc library included within the POV-Ray distribution. It is S_Cloud3.  I happily modified the nice blue colours into a dark, evil colour.  I'm not insane, just out of my mind!  The floor is just a really big sphere (and I mean big!) and it took a difference with a box in order to cut off an area in which the structure could sit on.  Then, textures and turbulence was added to it, as well as other things.

The tree was created by POV-Tree, a program which uses the TOMTREE library in order to create trees. All three trees are the same trees, just scaled and positioned differently. The fog just added a nice atmospheric effect, though it kind of dulled the brightness of the eye. But it still looked wicked nonetheless!

The Eye of References

Without these helpful sources, I don't believe that I could of gotten this done, so thank you!  Just note that most of these sources just had their source codes (if there were source codes) analyzed so I could learn more about how to do it.  One of the biggest things I looked for was for how the texture within the objects were done, as well as how the media layer worked.

The poem, images, backgrounds, web page was created by Henry Chung.

The Background and image resizing was done in Paint Shop Pro X and the Web Page in OpenOffice.Org 2.0 Writer and NVU 1.0.