EMAIL: noe.falzon@tiscali.fr NAME: NoŽ Falzon TOPIC: Frozen Moment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Eight-years-old rage COUNTRY: France WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 for Windows TOOLS USED: Only POV-Ray RENDER TIME: About a minute HARDWARE USED: Pentium III Dell computer running Windows 2000 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: As soon as I saw the topic, I tought about a little boy shooting is block game for a reason unexplainded, as many little boys do. I wanted to put the scene in a corner of a room, with the light from behind the camera. It is a wooden block game (the same than the one I had when I was younger), with many different kinds of woods. I put some marble walls because I think it is nice like that. And I didn't forget the baseboards. Finely, I tried to put an original signature, which would not ruin the rest of the image. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well. I never touched a 3D program before. Wandering on the web, I discovered the IRTC three weeks ago. I downloaded POV-Ray for Macintosh (yes, I use a Mac) two weeks ago. I realised that the rendering did not work. After a few messages to POV support team, it appeared that the problem was insolvable. So I downloaded POV-Ray for Windows, to work on my father's work PC. But as I comme back from school sooner than he comes back from work, I have a very little time to use the PC. Anyway, when I can't use the PC, I try to learn the POV-Ray language on my Mac, even if I can't render anything. I start to place components, and I render later, on the PC. Not really easy. But finally, I had time to finish.Problems encountered (many): - I had to familiarise with POV-Ray description language. Happily, the help is very good, and the possibility to insert 'templates' helped very much. - For the first time, it's really hard to convert what we have in the head into numbers. But with a bit of time it's OK. I rendered the scene many times changing only a bit each time to see what changes. I made this for positioning and sizing the elements, for choosing the textures (built in POV-Ray. Very useful), and in fact, for everything. - Sorry to say this, but I think the text editor for the Windows POV-Ray is really bad. The text file is really dirty, with spaces everywhere, carriage return, etc, but I don't have time to clean this with another text editor before the deadline. So you'll have to do with it (if someone ever wants to look in my sources ;P ). - I had difficulty with the size constraints. My rendered image in 800 by 600, converted in jpg, exceded the 250 ko limit. And as I wanted to keep the best image quality, I reduced the size to 640 by 480. In fact, that's not really a problem, since my image doesn't really have many little details. - I don't understand why, but the 'text' fonction in POV-Ray always refused to display the letter 'Ž' (accented e). To write my name ('NoŽ'), it was a problem. I tried many fonts, none worked. So I used a nickname : 'Noah'. In fact, that's simply the english translation of 'NoŽ'. It's not bad to have a nickname, I think. About the image, I can say that I'm quite satisfied. I made what I wanted to make, in a very little time. Sorry if this description was not enough technical, but I didn't read all POV-Ray documentation yet, so I don't know what are the other possibilities of POV-Ray. To conclude, congratulations to those who developped POV-Ray, because it is a really wonderful tool, and free.