EMAIL: paleblue@gmail.com
NAME: Stacy Michelle Haponik
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Stars Above
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1
TOOLS USED: GIMP, Inkscape
RENDER TIME: 17 minutes, 47 seconds
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1 gig of RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
A puzzle lies upon a plane, nearly complete. Behind it is the box it came in, propped up by its lid.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The puzzle is a height field on top of a plain rectangular box. The height field was created using The GIMP's "jigsaw" filter. An image map is laid on the height field.

The field of stars is a copyright-free image from NASA. It is downloaded from http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_550.html . The image use guidelines for NASA images are here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

The sides of the box were drawn in Inkscape. I tweaked all of the imagemaps in The Gimp.
The texture on the box is a canvas texture created by The Gimp which I applied to the box as a bump map.

After the final image was rendered, I cropped it using The Gimp.

OTHER NOTES: This is my first entry into the IRTC, and it's been really fun creating it. I learned alot about how height fields, bump maps, and image maps function, and why height fields are preferable for forming the shapes of objects, and bump maps are prefered for adding a textured surface to an object. I am very pleased with how this image came out, and hope to enter the IRTC again some time in the future.