# The Valley of the Blue Sun

These are the Persistence of Vision and GIMP files I used to create the cover image for the Gods & Monsters adventure The Vale of the Azure Sun.

## Requirements

These are the tools I used to create this image. You may not need these exact versions, but, at least in some cases, you will probably need something close to that version.

- Persistence of Vision 3.6
- GIMP 2.2.1
- Height Field Compressor 0.1.8
- POV-Tree 1.5
- MakeGrass Macro

You definitely will need the Height Field Compressor and POV-Tree, because I have not included the 50 megabyte grass.inc file or the 26 megabyte palm.mesh in this distribution.

## Creating the trees

Creating the strange trees is pretty easy: open POV-Tree, load the palm.inc file, and then export to a POV mesh. Use the filename palm.mesh.

## Creating the grass

Unfortunately, the height field compressor does not let you save its configuration files. Here are the steps you need to create grass.inc:

1. Start the height field compressor. It needs extra memory, so I use “java -Xmx300m -jar hfc.jar”
2. Load

1. Open the 8-bit greyscale “Vale Ground.png”.
2. Set the horizontal scale to 147 and the vertical scale to 14.

3. Pack

1. Leave the Block size at 8.
2. Leave the Number of blocks at 40000.
3. Leave Simplified packing unchecked.
4. Set Tolerance to 4 (0.21875).
5. Leave Probability mask unchecked.
6. Hit the Pack! button to pack. It will pack in two steps, and you can watch these steps in the status bar at the bottom of the window. On my computer, building the dictionary takes 10 to 20 seconds, and packing takes 3 to 4 minutes.

4. Export

1. Set the Number of objects to 10000000 (ten million).
2. Set the slope filter slider to -70 (70%).
3. Choose the Curved blades pane.
4. Set Area coverage to 80 (95.9%).
5. Set Leaf height to 0.3
6. Leave Tightness at 0.
7. Leave Resolution at 10.
8. Leave Touffes unchecked.
9. Leave Root angle range at 10.0 to 20.0.
10. Leave Leaf tip angle range at 30.0 to 45.0.
11. Hit the Export! button. Use the file name grass.inc. Export takes about 30 seconds on my computer.

## Rendering in Persistence of Vision

To render the image, open Blue.pov in Persistence of Vision (the files have also been tested with MegaPOV 1.2.1) and render at the size you want. I have more information about using Persistence of Vision at my Persistence of Text tutorials site.

It takes about 7 minutes to parse the scene files and 12 minutes to render (18 minutes total) on my computer.

For testing purposes, I have made it easy to turn off the sky, the grass, and the trees, since these are the most time-consuming to render. If renderAll is set to false, then renderGrass, renderTrees, and renderSky control whether each of those are rendered. In the case of trees, if renderTrees is set to false some very simple replacements are used in the scene.

I have also set up several views. All except for zombieView are for testing, viewing the scene from various locations. The most useful for testing is probably overView, which looks straight down on the scene. I have an idea that overView would also be a nice back cover image, but I’m not using it for that yet. The zombieView setting is a view from just below the hole in the sky that the player characters are most likely to come from the first time they enter the valley.

Change the viewType to any of the various views to change where the camera is positioned in the scene. Some view types will also change other parts of the scene. For example, overView will adjust the sky so that it doesn’t get in the way. The overView viewType also adds a red dot where the zombieView camera location is, and a white dot where the zombieView focal point is at.

## Copyright

To the extent that these scene files can be copyrighted, they are copyright 2007 Jerry Stratton. They are available under the Gnu General Public License, version 2.

## More Information

- Gods & Monsters
- The Vale of the Azure Sun
- GNU