TITLE: Madame Lazora
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lazora.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.5; Paint Shop Pro 7 (for signature and jpg
conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    4 days 13 hrs 50 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 2.53 GHz; 1 GB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  A fortune-telling machine in a carnival-like setting.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  The sky - uses the stacked planes technique, which I still haven't gotten the
hang of yet.  

  Background elements - almost all simple csg.  I deliberately made the
background elements very simplistic, to keep focus on the foreground.  The
lamps are lathe objects, and the pennants are simple bicubic patches.

  The booth - mostly csg, with lathes and prisms for some of the trim.  The
curtains are isosurface objects using a pigment function.  There is a thin
sheet of glass covering the window of the booth, although it doesn't really
show up at all.

  The body - most of my time went into creating this, using blobs with a bit of
csg.  I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, although it could definitely use
some fine-tuning.  The hair doesn't look real, I know, but it would have taken
more time than I had to even begin trying to get something better.  The
necklace chain is a sphere_sweep, which turned out a lot better than I
expected... I thought it would be harder getting it to align with the
curvatures of the body, but I think I got it looking pretty good.

  One last note... although the tarot cards don't show up that well in the
scene, my intention was to have the four cards correspond to other elements in
the scene.  (The Wheel - ferris wheel.  The Sun - sun medallion on necklace. 
Strength - the "Test Your Strength" game.  The Moon - the moon.)

  Comments/criticisms appreciated.  Happy holidays to everyone, and good
ray-tracing in the year ahead!