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.