EMAIL: mraiford@coserv.net NAME: Michael Raiford TOPIC: Winter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: A cold, Dreary Day COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: none RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.5 beta TOOLS USED: GIMP (for conversion to JPG), POVWin's text editor, LParser for the trees. RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 866 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It's a cold winter's day. Everyone is inside, keeping warm. The heat from the house has melted some of the snow on the roof, creating icicles. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well, It's been a while since I've done anything with POV-Ray, but since 3.5 is out, I decided to jump back in. As I read the topic, "Winter". Wow, almost spring, and they want me to think of winter. Well-- whar epitomises winter? Gray, dreary skies, ice, snow. An idea was born: Something that had dreary skies, ice, and snow! --But, it had to feel cold, too. More on that, later. This scene is a create experiment with SDL and 3.5's features. To start, I made a sketch of what I wanted. Bascally, I wanted to look down the side of this house, and see the warm light coming through a cold, frosty, window. Once the sketch was in order, thinking about how I'm going to turn the sketch into a scene. First things first. Lets get the snow out of the way. A heightfield was a logical choice for this. So, I sat, and thoght about a way to make smooth, flowing drifts of snow. Bozo seemd like a shoe-in for this. So, I used the bozo pattern to create the image for the heightfield. On to creating the house... Any building is basically a box, slap some brick texture and with the small bit of the house we'll be seeing, this make a convincing house. Without a roof. The roof is basically a box, turned 45 degreed and sliced in half along the XZ plane. The shingle texture is just bricks, and the melted snow on the roof is another heiht field. I love how the snow on the roof turned out, it's bascially a bozo pattern used to reveal a ripples pattern with a little bit of turbulence. It worked beautifully for creating the snow on the roof. I then added a block, with a normal of wood, and placed it under the edge of the roof on the side the camera was going to be on. At this point the house was placed at the edge of the heightfield, to give a good view of the snow that has fallen. I then chopped out a hole in the side, hollwoed the building, and added a light-source inside the house. and spent a couple hours trying to figure out why my difference had speckles, as it turned out, the lightsource was on the surface of the roof, causing the shadow tests to come back with random shadows. Great, now I have a hole with a light inside. What it needs is a window. What I needed was a chance to test out some of the more advanced SDL stuff that I've never tried. So I used loops to create the dividers and panes for the window. The window is made of 8 thin dividers and 9 panes. I get another chance to play with some 3.5 features... I wanted each pane to be slightly frosted. I considered using wood for this, but wood didn't look like I wanted. I wanted something like a box with rounded corners. A superellipsoid, so I used the superellipsoid internal function to create the frosting effect on the window panes. With the window in place, the soffet, snowy roof, and textures in place, it looked like a small cottage. Great! Then, I started thinking about the icicles. This was the main focus of the picture, and I wanted them to look somewhat convincing. Icicles are basically a cone, but slightly perturbed. Possibly by a noise function? So, I used an isosurface to create the icecicles. The toughest part was keeping the noise from being stretched with the scale, so I created a macro to create an icicle. scaling the values passed into the noise function by the length scale I gave the icicle. Each one is randomly generated along a line, and the whole unit was textured, and moved into place. The iciles didn't look right, something was missing.... so I added a sheet of ice to the soffet, it's just a very thin box, with a bozo normal on it. (the icicles had to drip from somewhere, right?) The scene was complete, but It was missing something. Trees! Outdoors has trees!. So I fired up LParser, took one of the many sample tree files, and generated a tree, placed it randomly about the scene, and left it at that. Yeah, the trees are green. I don't know lparser that much to strip the leaves, and the output is a little large to hand-pick through, so imagine they are some sort of live-oak. This was a fun scene to work on, and it lent itself easily to a few of the newer POVRay features.