TITLE: Detention
NAME: Karl Manning
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: karl@pemail.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.yi.com/home/ManningKarl/index.htm
JPGFILE: detent.jpg
ZIPFILE: detent.zip
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POVRAY 3.0 for Windows
TOOLS USED: 

Paper, lightbox, pencils, coffee
Paintshop Pro
Blob Sculptor 2.0a
3ds2pov

RENDER TIME: 30 mins
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 32M Memory
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A school of dolphins at school !

Caught again. Drawing is so much more interesting than maths. 
Detention is over. In the desk are the instruments of crime and a 
banana - why a banana, well you're not supposed to like school, 
definately not supposed to like detention and I don't like bananas !

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The blackboard was created using a heightfield. I made a random noise
picture in Paintshop Pro, reduced the colour depth to 2 bits 
(ie 4 colours) and saved as a gif. This gives a very flat, uniformly
irregular surface.

The text uses a font called "befrisky" and is translated halfway
through the blackboard surface, which combined with the height_field
gives a chalky effect. 

The text had small amounts of random x,y scaling and z rotation added
to make it look more like handwriting.

The sea-bed is another height-field created in Paintshop by spraying
white on a black background then running through the soften filter a
couple of times. It is also one of those wonderful accidents of
creation.

The triangles making up the image could be seen, so I resampled the
image from 100x100 to 200x200. I forgot to run it through the soften
filter and all those wonderful ripples appeared in the sand. I'd been
trying all sorts of ways to create a similar effect !

The galleon is a model from Avalon in pov format. I removed the sails,
got rid of all the error messages (there were a lot !) and scaled to
fit.

Dolphins - pah I wish I'd never thought of doing them. I have spent
so much time in different modelling ideas trying to create them.

I started using a blob created free-hand - end result a sort of grey
lumpy sock !

I then tried using blob sculptor - The body looked better but the head 
looked awful. (BTW why did the blob sculptors creators decide on shiny
sierra as the default color - my dolphins looked more like dog turds !)

I then had a look round the web for dolphin models - found some at
Avalon - converted them from 3ds files, and they looked more like
swordfish with long noses and fat bodies, so I didnt use them either.

In the end I traced a picture from a book (using my lightbox) onto
graph paper and generated bicubic-patches from this by hand.

Add some fog, and randomly place the weeds, pebbles and fish.


Thats about it !

Karl Manning
karl@pemail.net
14/4/96