EMAIL: tigerhawk@stic.net NAME: Tim Soderstrom TOPIC: Toys & Games COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Perfect Shot COUNTRY: United States of America WEBPAGE: http://www.moocowproductions.org RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray 3.6.1 (Gentoo Version) TOOLS USED: Gimp2 (Image Converstion, Title, Framing) RENDER TIME: 27:42:06 - Running in background on my workstation, hence it is not a benchmark time. HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon-XP 1800+ with 512MB RAM running Gentoo (Kernel: 2.6.9) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The perfect shot. The one that when that ball leaves your hand you know that it is destined to be a strike. All that is left to wait for the ball to sail down the lane and strike the pins in the most perfect manner for what seems like an eternity. Yet an eternity which is over in an instant, as the ball effortlessly collides with the pins in a violent crash. Strike! The Perfect Shot. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image was originally fathomed out of an idea for an unofficial bowling website to keep track of stats and scores where I work. A friend and I set out to make random bowling images. He used 3D Studio MAX while I went with Pov-Ray. Over time we started adding more and more elements to our images. This particular image is quite simple: a lathe was used for the pins, and the remaining objects are made using CSG. I find this image, however, to have quite a bit of style despite being somewhat simple. The style really comes from the composition of the image. This image really was a learning process as it has been sometime that I have worked in Pov-Ray. As a result, this image uses some relatively new features to me: focal blur and radiosity. Using both of these elements made render times shoot through the roof, but it is well worth the wait (though I wish PVMPov could do radiosity to help cut the render-time down). I also made use of a reflective floor complete with a glossy surface that I created by using a normal map. It is barely visible with the blur, but it is there. If you look closely, you may notice that the reflection only occurs on the wood slats (not the space in-between them). I did this partly because I was having trouble combining textures and partly because I think it looks cooler. The shadows were created with an area light and the blue tint of the pins is just a simple light above them. I tried really hard to make the pins have that blue-white look like they do in a real bowling alley, though I never got it to the level that I wanted. All in all, I am very proud of my first IRTC entry. I'm not sure if it really fits particularly well (though it is a game), but nonetheless it was extremely fun to make; and it even taught me a little bit about patience :)