Florian Brucker <tor### [at] torfboldcom> wrote:
> Nice work, Rob! You did a great job at the overall design, looks very
> steampunk-ish to me.

Thanks Florian - steampunk-esque I'd say...actually inspired by my passion for
both povray and World of Warcraft.

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!"

>
> I'd like to hear some details on the modelling (CSG, mesh, 3rd party
> programs, etc.) if you don't mind :)
>

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...


"There is no spoon."

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