TITLE: Basking
NAME: Jeff M. Thomas
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: jeff@twilightfair.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/weird2/gonk/povray/Basking/Basking.html
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: basking.jpg
ZIPFILE: basking.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5.beta.RC3.icl.win32
TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 5.1 : for image_map mask manipulation.
    3ds2pov : for .3ds file conversion
RENDER TIME: 
    Total : 3 hours 15 minuts 21 seconds
       (Finished 4/20/02 11:39pm. On the due date!)

HARDWARE USED: 
    IBM ThinkPad Intel Celeron 800mhz 320MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

    In the dead of winter a cat is treated to a vision of 
summer to come.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Like my previous entry the stained glass window is made of 
'carved' isosurfaces, 25 of them in this case, one for each 
color and one for the leading. The pattern for the window I 
drew freehand the day before the due date. Man I like cutting 
things close, I'm typing this at 9:30 and I hope the render 
finishes in time (if it doesn't you wont be reading this!)

I owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Melly. I studied his last 
entry to the IRTC, Lucy's Arrival, to see how he did the 
snow and from that wrote my own macros to rain down the 
powdery stuff on all my props.

The bench, celtic cross and tomb are modified from my previous 
entry. The art on the side of the tomb comes from Cari Buziak's 
web site which features her excellent work: http://www.aon-celtic.com/

Other object info:

The icicles are made with clipped and deformed f_piriform isosurface.

The snow on the props is made with macros using layered blobs built 
from spheres that are rained down with the trace routine. I use 
spheres of varying size in up to 3 layers to give that piled-on look.

The trees are made with Andrew Clinton's excellent Spline Tree include 
for which I am most grateful. It would have taken far to long for me 
to figure it out myself and I desperately wanted programmatic trees.

The fence is made from the same routine I used in 'Aaaahh, sunlight!'

The stone wall, flying buttresses, window frame and brass lamps are 
all custom CSG objects. The bricks use an upgraded StoneWall.inc I
wrote last time. This time I didn't need the roughness of isosuface
bricks, thank goodness for they would have never rendered in time.

The Cat is a mesh I downloaded from 3Dcafe and has no apparent credits. 
I used Steve Anger's 3ds3pov to convert it.

THE ZIP FILE:

It includes all scripts for making the image but none of the image_map 
files due to their size. Also excluded is the Cat mesh which is just 
too big.

Be warned, I didn't have the time to clean up the code so it get's messy 
in there. But it's cleaner than my last one!

NOT FINISHED IN TIME:

There was to be part of the inside of the church visible behind the window.
I wanted more animals.
I really would have liked more time to toy with the layout and colors of 
the window, but since I didn't get around to finishing drawing it and 
importing it until the DAY the contest was DUE I rather pushed it too 
close.
Rendering it bigger would have been nice too.