TITLE: Winter's First Breath
NAME: Robert J Becraft
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: castlewrks@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://user.aol.com/castlewrks         http://www.angelfire.com/md2/castlewrks

TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: winter1.jpg
ZIPFILE: winter1.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    IView32 (JPG conversion), PSP (Adding copyright), POSER, UVMapper,
OBJ2POV

RENDER TIME: 
    8 hours 38 minutes, 102 Meg of memory

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 433

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        
As always, I tie this to my medieval D&D world...

It is the winter solstice festival and market in a small town. Under the White
and Gray towers in the town's central square, shoppers are surprised by the
winters first snow.  One of the younger ladies is very happy and twirls in the
open space.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All of the buildings, booths, and booth objects were created in raw POV.  Random
loops are used for size, color and contents of the booths.  

I'm especially proud of the baskets... they are composed of actual weaves and
hold up very nicely to closeup tracing.

All of the figures were built in POSER and generated as an image on a black
background.  They are included as imagemaps on squares.

The snow was created in Windows paint program with the aid of the spray feature.
 White flakes were sprayed on a black background with the right density to give
the intended effect.  If you look closely, you will find layers of snow, the
ones farther back are restricted by the pel size of the image.

When you include imagemaps where you are making the background invisible, you
will need max_trace_level in the global_settings below to ensure that you don't
get black patches where the ray stops penetrating multiple layers of
imagemaps.
               
The final image was done with only one of each of the 4 lights on on the
lampposts... the first attempt with the whole boat was shaping up to be about
80 hours worth of render time.

Ding notice:  Poser is surprisingly lacking in winter medieval objects... so
those ladies in the front of the image are only slightly clothed, they are
tough medieval wenches.  I probably spent more time surfing for more clothing
than I did in making all the rest of the image.

