EMAIL: mhaynes@royell.net
NAME: Mike Haynes
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: A Little Rain
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.royell.net/~mhaynes/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Milkshape 3D, Paintshop Pro
RENDER TIME: 27 minutes 29 seconds for 1024 x 768 @ AA Threshold 0.3
HARDWARE USED: 450 MHz Athlon 384 RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
I remain planted firmly on the ground and notice that time must be broken (it never behaves the way I want it to). Dreams and ideas bubble up from seemingly impossible places while the relentless, futile search for true identity goes on through shallow masks of acquiesence. The way toward higher goals can easily be seen, but seems unreachable. Still the promise of a better tomorrow stretches over the horizon and I realize that in every life...a little rain must fall.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The tree was done with a sphere sweep cubic spline. The "foliage" is a simple mesh created with Milkshape 3D. I kept getting triangle shadow artifacts in the top "foliage" of the tree, so I placed two of them there with one directly in front of the other. The one that the camera sees was rendered with the "no_shadow" option. the one right behind it was rendered normally so I would still have a shadow. 

The masks were created with Milkshape 3D. 
The mesh for the masks is in the fem_head02.inc file. You are more than welcome to it, but I challenge you to try making one yourself ;-)  

The "Sky Island" is a height field turned upside down. There is also a "flattened" mirrored version of for the top, but it can't be seen from this camera angle.

The rain drops are SOR objects. 

The fire below the bubbles is a Y-scaled hollow sphere with media applied to it.

The clock was a lot of fun. Nothing beats good old CSG. The coil was created "brute force" with torus halves.  

The rainbow is right out of the help tutorial with a few tweaks to make it fit here.

Paintshop Pro was used to create the TGA images for the height fields, add my name to the image, convert to JPEG, and resize the image to 800 by 600.