TITLE: Comet Winter
NAME: Sherry K. Shaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tenmoons@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/pshawpsoft/
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sks_comt.jpg
ZIPFILE: sks_comt.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe PhotoDeluxe & Paint Shop Pro, under Win 95

RENDER TIME: 
    38m 21s

HARDWARE USED: 
    P2, 266 mhz, 96 mg, 4 mg video card


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Once it was a pleasant savannah, rolling down to the shores
of a wide, clear lake.  Then the sky fell and everything changed.  Prairie
fires and endless night, and then the snow...The big grazers were the first to
go, then the quick little predators that followed the herds.  The scavengers
had it better.  T. rex came here to feed, but once he'd munched the last dead
hadrosaur, he, too, succumbed.  Then one day, as the sky was beginning to
clear, a pack of little mammals, scavengers themselves, discovered something
odd melting out of the snow...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The distant hills, the snowdrifts
(including the one covering the late Mr. Rex), and the snow-covered terrain in
between are all height fields (drawn with PhotoDeluxe, converted to PGM with
Paint Shop Pro).  (Y'know, it takes a while to parse 77 height fields...)
     The bones and the critters are basically blobs, with the critters' tails
left un-blobbed for that possum-like look.
     The claws are meshes built by fiddling with some trig functions.  (I've
included SKS_Claw.inc as an example of one way to build claws or horns, or just
so you can say, "Why, yes, actually I HAVE used trig since high school--and
thank you SO much for asking!")
     I used PhotoDeluxe to add the title, copyright, and URL lines, and PSP to
convert the finished image from BMP to JPG format (72 DPI, compression level
2).
     Odd thing about the sky and the light...It was a dark and stormy night. 
I'd just rendered at 800 x 600 for the first time.  Suddenly there was a flash
of lightning and the old Shamrock monitor got, well, psychedelic.  As I was
reaching for the button to degauss, I saw that the center of the sky had gone
from the nice twilight lavender I'd worked so hard to produce to a distressing
yellowish brown.  "Oh, goodness!" I said (or words to that effect).  "That's
what it OUGHT to look like!"  Which, I suppose, is yet another example of a
mammal making an interesting discovery as a result of a change in the
weather...

