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...! |
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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, It
sees everything, The
Eye of Ludor, Ah
yes, the Eye
was a spying and
punishing tool, It
mentally
injects words, Once
the mind is
lost in
hopelessness and doubt, You
cannot see the
Eye of Ludor, |
The University of Lethbridge Hill Structure. Was taken by myself and served as a reference/guideline. |
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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.