BusyRat by Bill Marrs, November 1995
====================================

This is a frame from a Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams.  I'm not sure
what the date of this comic was, but I had saved it for several months
(taped to my computer).  Ratbert is at the computer, the guy in the
background is just some random office worker, perhaps a manager.

Artist's comments:
=================

It's funny that something that for Scott Adams probably only took 30
seconds to draw, took me hours to create as 3D objects in a scene file.
...and half an hour for a computer to draw!

I was pleased with the boss-man in the background - he is very simple,
and took me little time to put together.

Ratbert is mostly made up of rounded tube objects (cylinder plus a
sphere at each end). 

Ratbert's tail was hard.  I suspect I should have looked into Connect
the Dots Smoother or some other tool to create a smoother tube-tail.  I
didn't have much extra time this month though, so I didn't have time to
redo it.  Plus, I sort of liked the bent look I produced. 

Tools:
=====
    POVsb         A windows scene builder.  I used this to create every object
                  except for the 3D lettering (although even these were imported
                  into POVsb and manipulated there).   
    Font3d        A DOS utility for converting true type fonts into 3D objects
                  as you might have guessed the words were made by Font3d.
    Winpov08      An unofficial Windows compile of Povray.  While I didn't
                  use it for the image you see presented, I did use it quite
                  a bit while working on the scene.

Image:
=====
    The image you see was rendered on a 90 MHz Pentium PC.

POV-Ray Options in effect: +v1 +ft +mb25 +a0.300 +j1.000 +r3 -q9 -w800 -h600
-s1 -e600 -k0.000 -mv2.0 -ibusyrat.pov -obusyrat.tga -lP:\include

Rendering Time: 24 minutes.

Files:
=====
    busyrat.psb  - The POVsb file.
    busyrat.pov  - Povray scene file as generated by POVsb (with some
                   minor pathname changes to enable better portability)
    include.inc  - A file used by POVsb to allow for includes (it has
                   little in it.
    
Comments?
=========
    Please email any comments or criticisms to bill@atria.com.