EMAIL: ptdawson@voicenet.com
NAME: Paul T. Dawson
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Abstract
COUNTRY: U.S.A.
WEBPAGE: http://www.voicenet.com/~ptdawson
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for MS-DOS
TOOLS USED: DOS Edit
RENDER TIME: About 15 hours
HARDWARE USED: AMD 486-120
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An abstract picture of a bird in flight

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
>From November 1st to December 29th, I procrastinated, and started
several scenes, but didn't work on *finishing* any of them. On December
30th, I just gave up (!) and went to the beach (65 degrees and sunny!).
On returning home, I found the e-mail about the EXTENDED deadline!
Well, then I went into a complete beyond-the-last-minute-rush, and
created this scene. It's, um, different --- if you want to give this
picture about 3 points, don't worry, I'll understand! 8-)

The scene is created in three passes.

In PASS-1.POV, there is a simple sky_sphere. This is rendered at 640x480,
and then the bottom half is cut off (in a paint program). This gives a
file called PASS-1.TGA, which is 640x240 pixels. Total time for that is
just about one half hour.

Then, in PASS-2.POV, that picture is image_mapped onto a group of large
pyramid shapes. There are several other things in PASS-2.POV, including
a large "bird" with sine-wave-wings, a checkerboard height_field floor,
five spotlights, and a type-1 atmosphere. It's all very abstract! That
scene takes about 8 hours to render, at 800x600, with AA set to 2x2.

Well, the PASS-2.TGA file is quite impressive, but the background was
rather dark. So, in PASS-3.POV, we take out the plain "Coral-Crackle"
background, and replace it with PASS-2.TGA. To jumble things up a bit,
the new backdrop is rotated upside down and backwards. Everything else in
the scene stays the same. That takes about 6.5 hours to render, also at
AA 2x2, and then convert it to a JPG, and call it ABSTRACT.JPG - done!

All of the POV files are very small. This isn't like last time, when I had
about 40 source files! This entry is just a [pathetic?] last minute thing!

Thanks for reading all this! 8-) P.T.D.