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Member : Ivanhoe

Image description

To prevent the village from being destroyed by the dragon every seven years a virgin has to be sacrificed on a closeby hilltop, the cursed place where the dead hornbeam stands. Sometimes a brave hero tries to prevent the maiden from her doomed fate by killing the ugly beast but never was he seen again.

Thats the story told by the olders, mostly to keep young girls restrained, but what happened in reality?

Description of how this image was created

My idea was to do a variation of the "Damsel In Distress" theme - but without distress at all. Inspirations (among others): "King Kong", "The Beauty And The Beast", "The Lady And The Unicorn", "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer".

The sky was made with Terragen and within POV-Ray cube-mapping was used. Advantages: low memory consumption (compared to high-res sphere mapping) as only the visible panes of the cube do need high-res maps. Easy to setup and modify within Terragen and POV-Ray. No problems with the poles.

DAZ's MD2, V4 and MFD are used.

Tree, flowers and bushes were created with XFrog.

Grass, ferns and rocks were created and placed by a set of "planting-macros" I'm currently working on.

Additional modeling was done with Blender, all mesh conversion with Pose-Ray and image map preparation, final image adjustment and jpeg-conversion with IC - for sure ;)

Credits:
Gilles Tran, who - to my knowledge - was the first who introduced cube-mapping to POV-Ray.
Norbert Kern, for sharing a lot of information about his ways of "planting within POV-Ray".
Fay Wray, for being the best "Damsel In Distress" ever.

Final note: two attempts of mine to render this image "as it should be" (and render-times measured in days) did fail. The first time the OS did decide to shut down POV-Ray for a reboot and the second time POV-Ray did fail after 93%. - and for unknown reasons continue render did not work in both cases. But as I really wanted to submit something for this round (and also wanted to break a lance for dragons - they are much friendlier as most people seem to think ;) - I finally decided to use one of the numerous test-render I did while scene development. I'm really sorry for this and if I should ever be able to create a final shot (in a few months, or so) I will announce it in the forum.

General statistics
No of ratings	:	12
Min. overall rating	:	36 (12 / 12 / 12)
Max. overall rating	:	58 (20 / 20 / 18)
Sum of rating	:	531 / 720
Date uploaded	:	2009-08-16 23:04:52

Specific details Note: The maximum value below is misleading as the voting system has changed. If the member votes for all the entries and has created one him/herself, there is an automatic 20/20/20 score added to the value (This encourages all members who enter to vote).
Rating type	:	Min : Max : Sum : Out of
Artistic	:	12 : 20 : 179 : 240
Concept	:	9 : 20 : 174 : 240
Technical	:	12 : 18 : 178 : 240
Overall	:	36 : 58 : 531 : 720

Comments by members when rating this image

1.   31-08-2009 A test render?? Can't wait to see the final! Very nice image and good concept. 2.   31-08-2009 Very nice shot. Too bad the final version didn't make it in time. Looking forward to seeing it when it's complete. 3.   30-08-2009 Average concept, but great artistic and technical. I think you stand a good chance of winning the round. 4.   26-08-2009 [ThomdeG] Excellent! A very ingenious interpretation of the "maid and dragon" theme. 5.   24-08-2009 excellent the best one this time 6.   23-08-2009 Ah, the classic "rescue the beautiful monster from the ravening princess" theme... wait - what? - Good job overall; too much fog though; some subtle focal blur instead would have done good. 7.   17-08-2009 A real shame you could not get your render finished.