EMAIL: paullusmagnus@hotmail.com
NAME: Paul Stansifer
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Paused Skirmish
COUNTRY: United States
WEBPAGE: none
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: MS-Paint (for image maps), Logitech Image Studio (for jpeg compression)
RENDER TIME: 
  Image on screen: 4 hr 15 min 10 sec
  Main scene: 5 hr 14 min 29 sec
HARDWARE USED: Intel Celeron 897 mHz, 128 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  While three troopers attack an airborne menace from the slight protection of ruined corner of an old building, one of their comrades falls to an explosion from a shell launched far away--

  The new owner of a raytraced real-time strategy game has paused the game to go fetch another glass of orange juice.  One of the troopers onscreen, whose AI script keeps running because of some unpatched bug, is surprised to see the battlefield action stop.  Not knowing what to do, the trooper wanders about, looking at the frozen battle from other angles.

A note on the interface:
  I attempted to create a sort of decentralized interface that might appear in a heavily micromanaged game.  Each friendly unit has a vertical health indicator and a set of flags on its selection circle that can be used to quickly give individual orders.  Orders also probably can be given from a context menu brought up by right-clicking (a la "The Sims").

  Information panels (like the minimap in the upper right corner of the screen) can be shown or hidden so that the entire screen can be devoted to battle.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

  The ground on the onscreen image is a heightfield, created from an agate pattern.  The raggedness of the walls is also from a heightfield, as is the snowdrift they accumulated.  The snow on top of it is a blob made with the trace function.  The footprints from two of the troopers were placed by a spline.

  The low-flying vehicle was made from six separate convex parts (excluding the guns), to which I traced planes.  The intersections of these planes were put together and given a reflective finish.

  The troopers are unions of cylinders and spheres, mostly.  I did the positioning just by fiddling with the numbers in the vectors, which is actually relatively easy.  If they remind you of LEGO minifigs, well, I intended for them to look stumpy because their suits are probably pretty bulky.  The orders flags are image maps.

  Onscreen items (the cursor, the text, and the minimap) were placed with the screen.inc macros.
  
  The keyboard in the "real world" is CSG, with a macro to define the keys. The text on the keys was created with the object pattern and text objects (all of the non-text characters came from fonts).  It easily takes the majority of the rendering time because of its complexity (each key is eighteen objects).

  Almost all the lighting in the main scene is radiosity (there are two light sources, the monitor light and the Num Lock light, but they contribute very little to the lighting of the scene).  The monitor image is an image map on a section of a sphere with a high ambient value.

  Gamma correction was a mess-- at the default gamma value, the scene was too bright and had patchy light.  Unfortunately, this probably means that the scene looks weird on monitors that have significantly different gamma values than mine.

  The papers lying around are the Common Application (for college admissions), copied from a pdf file, and the cables are sphere sweeps.