A Fool's Gambit (an Adventure of Tina Chep)

She had been so close.

With patient cunning and care, Tina had slowly crept up closer and closer to the heartland of the C-verse. She had crept from square to square, unnerved by the dreadful and unholy howling from the sealed tombs. She had been on the point of discovering the deeply hidden secret of the verse, so well guarded by the minions of those masters of deceit: Roy Queen and Dorcas King.

But she had forgotten about her arch-enemy, the Plane Checker. Of course! It was so obvious after all. Naturally, he had sold himself to those devils in disguise that had dominated the Checkered Plane for many an age. How stupid she had been to forget his unrelenting hate since those long gone IRTC days.

And now she had to escape with her life and sanity, closely pursued from square to square by those sinister servants of Queen and King: Epamimondas (Happy Eppy) Rook and Victor Bishop. And she should beware of those avatars of the Checker trying to slow her down….

This scene brought me to the limits of my system’s memory capacities. Several times POV-Ray shut down during parsing or rendering due to lack of memory. I had to trim the scene to its maximum (not a bad thing in itself), but a few minor details could not be implemented to my entire satisfaction as a result.

Most objects (towers, ornithopter) in this scene have been modelled in Silo2. However, the vintage Citroen was built by Ferdinand, and the Harley Davidson is an anonymous 3ds model downloaded from the web. The human figures have been posed in Poser7 and ported to POV-Ray by FlyerX’s Poseray.

John VanSickle’s heightfield patch macro was used for the middle background; Rune’s particles macros were used for the dust trails; the bare bush-like objects were made with Mischa Reiser’s macro; grass was planted with a series of macros gradually developed by myself, while Thomas Luft’s Ivy Generator was used for… the ivy.

The sky and Sun are controlled by LightsysIV (Jaime Vives Piqueres et al.) while the clouds were generated by Zeger Knaepen’s FastCloud macro. Radiosity was used in this final render

This is The Adventures of Tina Chep #3. Those of you who have followed the genesis of the TC-RTC know about Tina Chep and her first encounter with her enemy, the Plane Checker.