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Inspired by epic battle scenes such as David Lloyd's Siege (http://www.3d-digital-wasteland.com/tut_siege.html),
I decided to do a fortress/castle siege scene for this IRTC round. I didn't want to glorify violence or depict blood and guts. Instead, I wanted to
depict a scene of foreboding fear and dread. To me, the fear of violence is often more powerful than the violent act itself. I thought a fortress under overwhelming attack would convey that sense of entrapment and impending doom. I have no idea in what time period this scene would take place -- there are likely anachronisms throughout (as well as poor military tactics).
As is often the case, I had no idea what the final vantage point of the scene would be. I started by creating models of things that I wanted to use in the scene, moved them about, and played with camera positions until I liked what I saw. I settled on a camera position relatively early in this project.
The sky is a set of stacked planes to create subtle clouds. The mountain is a heightfield with a complex texture. The foreground terrain is also a bozo/f_ridged_mf based heightfield. The trees are dropped onto the terrain using trace(); they are clumped together using using eval_pigment() on a bozo based pigment. (hurray for bozo!) I tried many options for trees and found some free firs at Turbosquid: (http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Index.cfm?keyword=&media_typeid=2&categoryid=20059&sort_column=A5&sort_order=asc). A bit of ground fog adds some depth.
I started this project by creating the attacking characters on the ground (soldiers, archers, knights, flag bearers, and mounted commanders). All the characters were rigged and textured in DAZ|Studio. There are 23 different characters on the ground (mapped with very low resolution images).
I struggled with the formation the ground troops (random vs lined up). I tried various bozo and granite patterns to clump them together, but never achieved a satisfying result. The soldiers are dropped onto the heightfield using trace().
Some CSG catapults are present on the battlefield, but are not shown launching any projectiles.
The fortress is very simple CSG with some photographic textures applied. Same for the siege towers. Siege towers were very simple CSG and probably not very realistic. According to my research, siege towers were often covered in animal pelts to prevent flaming projectiles from setting them on fire. I tried adding pelts, but they looked very poor. Consequently, I scrapped my plan for the defenders to have incindiary weapons. I had planned some more elaborate defences as well, such as pouring boiling liquid on the attackers, but ran out of time. There are lots of arrows being fired from the battlements on the right side (but they are hard to see).
The foreground battle contains 17 different characters (mostly different knights). Other than the characters clashing with one another, they were individually placed with trial and error (not entirely convincingly IMO). To preserve memory, the defenders (and many attackers) reuse the same
image_maps (attack of the clones?).
The large number of characters and trees required about 6 GB of memory.
The smoke is done with media; the fire is a bright light embedded within the cloud.