EMAIL: chrish@rivernet.com.au NAME: Chris Hernandez TOPIC: Childhood COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Ice Cream! COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: POV 3.02 for Windows TOOLS USED: Sonya Roberts trees v3.0, lots of Smirnoff Blue Label RENDER TIME: 18 hrs 28 mins HARDWARE USED: - 486DX2-80 clone (a.k.a. "ol' paperweight") for writing scene - Toshiba 440CDT (P166MMX, 16MB) laptop borrowed from my dad for final render(s). IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It's the end of a long day. It's hot. The kind of heat Venutians would feel warm in. It's muggy. The kind of humidity meteorologists get excited about. We're sitting in the front yard doing our best not to melt. The sun sinks slowly over the horizon. "Hey, you guys wanna play handball?" "Nah. The tennis ball burst into flames about half an hour ago." "Oh yeah." "How 'bout we get some squish......" Wait a minute... What's that sound? Oh my God... It can't be... It IS!!! ICE CREAM! "Ice cream man! Ice cream! Wait ice cream man! Ice cream!!!!" DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This entire scene was created by hand. No modellers here, ma'am! Each element was developed by itself before I put them all together in the final scene. In an extension to the topic, the 2 houses you see in the background are the houses that my parents and I have lived in during my childhood. The house on the right (red brick single storey) was the first house my family bought here in Australia. The other is the house that they still live in. They are all CSG objects (like all the elements in the scene). Since they were going to be in the midground, I decided to economize on computation and built the plants in then garden with simple objects, and let the textures do most of the work. Likewise, the grass in the yards are simple object given a fairly radical normal. For the grass in the foreground I needed a little bit more detail, so I created them out of joined height fields and pigment_maps. The bush in the foreground was created with Sonya Roberts tree include file v3.0. Many thanks and also kudos to Sonya for this great file. The trees in the background are GIFs mapped onto very thin boxes. The GIF's were from Axem textures at axem2.simplenet.com. Again, this was done for economy reasons, as I run a fairly slow computer. As it is, my 486 flaked out and crashed during the final scene integration renders. I left the thing running for 4 days on just one render, and it collapsed into a quivering heap. I had to borrow my dads P166 laptop to finish off the scene. (The final render took 18 and 1/2 hrs on the Pentium, and it renders an average of 10 to 15 times faster than my 486...). The clouds are based on Darin Dugger's "Kite Clouds" in skies.inc. I fooled around with the maps and scaling a little to make it look like late afternoon/sunset type clouds. I didnt like the way the clouds looked bunched up on the horizon, so I added a very thin fog to fade things out at infinity. (I *love* the way Bryce2 renders do this.... anyone know how to replicate the effect with POV?) Just lying off camera are some elements such as a wooden paling fence and the shell of another house. I'd hoped that these would give a little interplay of shadow and light in the scene, but I couldnt quite get it to work as well as I'd hoped. While we're on that train of thought, the arms in the scene are blocky and unconvincing, but I thought that the scene really suffered without them. I think that I could have improved them given time, but I just couldnt gather enough time over the Christmas holidays. Probably a mistake to make them out of primitives rather than blobs. I got the picture of the ice cream cone from ABC online at www.abc.net.au. It's a picture from the cover of an album called "Triple J's Hottest 100 vol 3". By the way, the licence plate of the truck was POV-301. A bit small to see clearly, but I thought it quite amusing.