Thunder

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
When the senses are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
who can stand?
[...]

These lines (primarily the first one), from William Blake's Prologue to "King Edward the Fourth" and recited in Loreena McKennit's song Lullaby, happened to come to my mind when thinking about dragons, inspiring me to this motif.

Is this just the hallucination of a fatigued soldier, conjured up by his longing for "a tongue to drown the throat of war"? I'm not sure. I guess it's up to interpretation.

Models are 3rd party work from DAZ, posed and arranged in Poser and converted via PoseRay to POV-Ray format. Textures for the dragon and vehicles were mostly left unchanged except for gamma correction of tbe bitmaps in IC; textures for the soldiers as well as the M16 rifle make heavy use of POV-Ray's procedural texturing for dirt and wear. The distant hills are height fields generated from a Mandelbrot fractal.

Atmospheric effects make use of three layers of ground fog: One to fade distant objects to blue, one for the ground dust, and a third with a negative color to avoid the two adding up too bright.

Motion blur was achieved by rendering a short 15-frame animation, with an additional 16th final frame to average all the frames together in POV-Ray. File format choice proved a crucial point in this respect: Only OpenEXR turned out to be fully capable of preventing any subtle color banding in the sky. For conversion to JPG I used IC, which is smart enough to dither the image when converting to 8 bit. The final frame also served to overlay the signature, as adding it which Photoshop turned out to re-introduce those banding artifacts.

For both smooth shadows, focal blur and radiosity I took advantage of the multi-pass render to get away with low-quality settings: The sun's position is slightly jittered on each pass, and radiosity settings are somewhat randomized; for focal blur I patched the POV-Ray code to get a differently randomized focal blur pattern for each frame.

The shot was actually rendered at double resolution, for no other reason than to also make a desktop wallpaper from it; the quality improvement for this lower-res version appears minimal, so the shot could just as well have been rendered in something like 40 minutes.