TITLE: br_globe
NAME: Florent "Bruce" Revelut
COUNTRY: FRANCE
EMAIL: Florent.Revelut@supelec.fr
WEBPAGE: http://revelut2.rez-gif.supelec.fr/perso/index.html
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: br_globe.jpg
ZIPFILE: br_globe.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.5 Beta (but only the fonctionnality of the 3.1g)

TOOLS USED: 
    L_syst (an home made tree generator)

RENDER TIME: 
    8 56 50

HARDWARE USED: 
    Laptop with Celeron 650, 128MB of RAM, 10GB of hdd

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When I saw the topic of this session, I immediatly thought to those little
spheres that we buy during the vacation which show you your vacation location
under the snow when you turn it over.
Here, the object has just been keft on a table, and as it is magic, it is still
snowing...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image was created directly in PovRay, with the Windows version (and then
its GUI). The hardiest for me was that, as I didn't find any acceptable
open-Source program to render a tree (sure I'm not very aware of searching
techniques with google), I simply decided to... programm it. The result can be
found at http://revelut2.rez-gif.supelec.fr/peros/L_syst/index.html (site all
in French, I 'll translate it one day). The result is quite hard to use, but I
know then perfectly how it works, and I personnaly have no problem to use it,
which was in fact my main goal. Well, this ever took me quite a lot of time.
The second problem was how to make the ground. I wanted to use an height-field,
but it is also really hard to find a good editing software, and as I had no
time to programm it, I chose something else. I finally decided to us blobs to
make the snow.
The little house was not really a problem, it is made easily with a macro and
some loops.
The table and the wall behind are also quite easy to make, beacause they use
easy fetaures and textures.
Last but not least, the falling snow : that was my harder problem, in terms of
time and of work ad of... After having tried media (it took me 2 days to
realize I was really unable to use those primitives - Well, I regret halo of
pov3.0 ...), I tried using spheres. After some work this was looking quite
gteat. So all flakes of snow are in fact little no_shadowing spheres. they are
placed randmly in the sphere.... and that's all!
In the Zip file, I included everything to render the file. I also added
L_syst.exe, my djgpp windows compilation of the soft I spoke about 2 lines
above. If want to try the linux version, get the sources or more examples, just
go to http://revelut2.rez-gif.supelec.fr




