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.