TITLE: kaxmas
NAME: Kenneth Allred
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: res189pe@verizon.net
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: kaxmas.jpg
ZIPFILE: kaxmas.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    PaintShop Pro (for the image maps), POVRay (for everything else)

RENDER TIME: 
    52 hrs, 06 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 2.67Ghz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

 This it what it might look like in front of my house if it ever gets cold
enough
to snow around here in December. Occasionally it does, but it seldom lasts long
enough to build a snowman. In fact, the last snowman we built was when my
middle
kid was about five.... he's eightteen now. I managed to get a picture of it
before
it melted away the next day.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

   Except for creating some image maps, the entire thing was done with POVRay.
I
downloaded the program 40 days ago, and have been madly typing away ever since.
In hind sight, I should have invested the time to learn Moray.
   The snowman is composed of spheres, cylinders, and a cone for the nose. The
large snowballs are blobbed together. Part of the scarf is a bicubic patch. I
first assemble the arms, hat, and scarf, then rain down 5000 little snow blobs
on the pieces. I use a macro derived from one created by Tom Melly to make snow
blobs in his irtc entry "Lucy's Arrival". I then assemble the remaining pieces.
   The tree was created using the xtree include file by Remco de Korte. I
started
off manually positionng the lights, but it became such a pain that I was forced
to 
learn the POV programming language. I figured out the tree macro and managed to
tap
into it to add lights. I thought I was in trouble after deciding to change from
high abient spheres to actual light sources. (Rendering slowed to a crawl!) But
I
soon discovered what a light_group was, and things sped back up. The revised
xtree (lxtree) has been uploaded to the POVRay Object Collection site.
   The fireplace uses the bricks include file by Jeff Lee, though I'm not sure
it
benifits much from it at this distance. I intended to cover the mantle with
several
home made Christmas cards, but only had time to make one. It is made from an
image of
this scene, processes with Paint Shop Pro, and included as an image map. Hanging
above
the mantle is a picture of a cross stitch done by my wife, also processed with
Paint
Shop Pro and brought into the virtual world as an image map.
   The house is modeled after my own. I create one board, then a loop duplicates
the
board (after randomly translating the texture) along the front of the house. The
porch
light actually took me two days to model. I realize that most folks could
probably whip
one out in ten minutes, but I also suspect most of you have been doing this a
bit longer
than me. The light bulb comes from bulbsokt.pov by James R. Wilson.
   The ground started out as a height map. But when I swithed over to using
radiosity
it didn't look right, so I dumped it. The snow blobs are created using the same
macro
that drops snow on the snowman. The bushes are created using the maketree macro
by
Gilles Tran. I looked at four different tree macros and this was the only one
that
I could figure out how to make bushes with. The bushes then have 2,500 little
snow blobs
rained down upon them. The foot prints on the steps were created by using Paint
Shop Pro
to turn a picture of a sole into a height map. 
   I created a macro to do the falling snow. I provide it the cubic coordinates,
and the
number of "flakes" and it fills the space with 20,000 tiny cubes in random
orientations.
The lamppost is a sample file included with POVRay and is by Anton Raves. I only
had
time to create one neighbor house across the street. I suspect that had I
invested the
time to learn Moray, I could have built a dozen houses.
   The milestone for this project came as I was looking at Tom Melly's
tmworld.pov file.
Up till that point I was manually commenting/uncommenting sections of code to
test
various features. Looking at Tom's work enlightened me the fact that a much
better method
was to use variables like "ShowTree" or "UseAreaLights" to control things.
   Now it's off to learn Moray....