TITLE: Perpetual Winter
NAME: Julian MacDonald
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: macdonald@lonhelyg.freeserve.co.uk
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jmacwint.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Art of Illusion v 1.1 beta (artofillusion.org)

TOOLS USED: 
    Art of Illusion v 1.1 beta

RENDER TIME: 
    1.5 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 500 MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A bit of a cheat I suppose; it's virtually impossible to tell which season it is
in the South Pole!  Still it has obvious Winter elements: snow, ice, mist.  I
have taken what I presume is artistic licence in the presence of icicles; it
probably never gets warm enough for the ice/snow to melt to form them but never
mind.  The image came out a lot more cartoony that I planned and there is a lot
I am unhappy with but there's something about the final image which I quite
like.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I have submitted a few images to previous IRTCs using Povray but this is the
first time I have used Art of Illusion.  I can thorougly recommend this
program; it's an open source project that incorporates modelling (including
subdivision surfaces), advanced texture and material support (including true
displacement mapping), animation (including support for skeletons and texture
animation) and a choice of render engines; a fast raster engine and a high
quality raytracer with built in support for depth of field, motion blur,
blurred reflections and global illumination.  

I have used but a small portion of the available features in this image.  The
penguins were modelled using subdivision surfaces with textures mapped per
vertex.  The foreground mountains and the snow were triangle meshes, the latter
mapped with true displacement mapping. The background mountains are just a
'cardboard cut-out' and the mist/fog is a simple cube placed in front of the
background mountains and with a fairly simple procedural material applied.