EMAIL: ssloan@cs.uah.edu
NAME: Steve Sloan II
TOPIC: Childhood
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Snoopy
COUNTRY: Hartselle, Alabama, USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.uah.edu/cs/students/ssloan
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02
TOOLS USED: CorelDraw 7, hand-coding, a ruler
RENDER TIME: about 1 hour
HARDWARE USED: 486 DX4-100

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
    A young resident of Clarke City, an orbiting space colony in
geosynchronous orbit, is taking his first space-walk. Billy Sloan
is on a second-grade class field trip. His tour guide is a company
called "Space Kids", one of three companies in Clarke City that
takes people outside the station. Space Kids is the only one that
specializes in children, so the school decided to hire them. The
first space-walk is a rite of passage in the orbiting space stations.
    Billy has taken an old friend with him. Snoopy is an heirloom
from his Earth-bound ancestor, Steve Sloan II. Billy has accidentally
let Snoopy float free, but he should be able to catch him. If he
doesn't, Snoopy will endlessly orbit the Earth, and maybe a future
generation will find him.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
    This image began as an attempt to model one of my oldest and most
beloved stuffed animals, an old Snoopy doll I was given when I was two
years old (I'm 24 now.) Snoopy is so old that his once white and soft
fur is now gray and slightly mattted. His red shirt is slightly stained
and miscolored. His black, shiny eyes are even scratched. Unfortunately,
due to starting a new job, and a hectic class schedule, I ran out of
time to finish the image, so I didn't get to texture the eyes properly.
I wanted to give Snoopy some kind of background scene, but I couldn't
think of one until the last minute. I originally planned to put Snoopy
in a child's room, aboard an O'Neill-type spinning space station, with
a view of the inside of the station out the window, but I ran out of time.
I finally thought of the current scene, with the child in space, reaching
for Snoopy.
    Snoopy's stained red shirt was textured with red and off-red pigment
maps. His fur is a modified version of the "soft" textures posted to
comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, scaled larger to give a "scruffy" look
to his fur. His feet and head are blob objects, while the rest of him is
simple CSG modeling. The child's hand is also done with CSG. The label on
the spacesuit was done in CorelDraw 7, using the "Comics" font, then
exported to GIF. The starfield was simply borrowed from the POV-Ray texture
files. The entire scene was hand-coded without a modeler.
    I was careful to arrange the objects in the scene to create a balanced
image. The hand reaching out draws the eye toward Snoopy, and the red color
of the label draws the eye to read it.