For Gnomeregan!

Member : rmcgregor

Image description
Backstory: The eccentric, often-brilliant Gnomes have an obsession for developing radical new technologies and constructing marvels of mind-bending engineering. Outcast from their wondrous techno-city of Gnomeregan the Gnomes now share the resources of Dun Morogh's frozen peaks with their Dwarven cousins. Although the dwarves of Ironforge also have a propensity for technology and engineering, it is the gnomes who provide the critical, visionary designs for most of the Dwarves' weapons and military vehicles.

This Image: Two Gnomish flyboys test their new experimental flying machines over the frozen wilds of Dun Morogh... "For Gnomeregan!"

(for any World of Warcraft fans out there ;)

Description of how this image was created
The design of these gnomish monoplanes was inspired by the Xiggs Fuselighter flying machine as seen in the World of Warcraft quest "Signal for Pickup" in Azshara (although I was tempted to use the standard Gnomeregan biplane design). You can see the original at this URL:

http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/mob.html?wmob=8446&locale=enUS;source=live

The aeroplane parts were modeled mostly with Wings3d, with some POV-SDL CSG thrown in. I exported the Wings3d objects to OBJ and then converted them to Mesh2 using PoseRay. I wrote a couple of POV-SDL macros that assemble the parts into unique aeroplanes by allowing random variations in the texturing. During assembly each part is textured individually with layered proceduralized image maps and straight procedural textures all composited on-the-fly (no pun intended).

Since I was short on time for this piece I pre-rendered the mountains, lake, and sky that are visible in the background using Terragen, and then projected that as an imagemap onto a background plane. For global ambience and reflection mapping I used a simulated HDRI light dome with a spherical map of the cloudy sky and snowy mountains on an ambient sphere scaled to 1000 units.

I grabbed the ubiquitous hammer and mountain symbol of Ironforge directly from a World of Warcraft screenshot (WoW sidebar: My main toon is Sgt.Jhary, level 70 holy priest, Etherion Guild, Llane Realm, Alliance) and image mapped it to the wings and tails of the planes as a TGA with alpha channel.

The final bit was to make the props look convincingly spinning/blurred so I switched over from POV-Ray 3.6 to MegaPov 1.2 for the final render using the motion_blur feature. There's a simple 2 bounce radiosity setting in the final render, again because I ran out of time... I thought I had 2 more weeks, and was planning to have media smoke trails and a few other goodies but just found out the competition now ends 14 days before the end of the month, so... well here it is, as is...

General statistics
No of ratings	:	8
Min. overall rating	:	32 (12 / 12 / 8)
Max. overall rating	:	60 (20 / 20 / 20)
Sum of rating	:	370 / 480
Date uploaded	:	2007-12-17 12:10:30

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 : 121 : 160
Concept	:	12 : 20 : 132 : 160
Technical	:	8 : 20 : 117 : 160
Overall	:	32 : 60 : 370 : 480

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