TITLE: "Half a liter o' petrol..."
NAME: Greg M. Johnson
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gregj56590@aol.com
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Still Images
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: hlpetrol.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray ONLY

RENDER TIME: 
    8 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Aptiva 200 MHz Pentium Chip

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A man driving a convertible late on a moonlight night through the woods.  What
could go wrong?  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All done in POV-ray.
The hedge is a series of thin-walled boxes with a crackle pattern, with one of
the colors in the pattern being transparent. The man is a series of blobs, with
negative blobs and CSG eyeholes. The car is a superellipsoid, with CSG holes
for the passenger seat and wheels. The road and its stripe are a long box.  The
headlights on the car are jittery spotlights. I used textures for the finish on
the car from the standard .INC files.  My starfield texture was created by Jeff
Burton, off the POVLAB  .INC files. 
Were I not approaching the deadline, I might have put more detail in the car,
improved the texture of the grass and road, and exposed some branches (or feet)
at the bottom of the hedge.
This is my first entry; I only used POV-ray.  I am a frustrated CorelDream 3D
user who was happy to find POV-ray. I've looked at a few different modeller
programs, but have not gotten comfortable with any of them. I have purchased
Bryce and Poser, but am waiting to install them until after I finish writing my
Master's Thesis.  My goal in entering this contest is to get advice on my
technique and to score better than the worst non-sarcastic entry; or to beat at
least one person who beats any entries by Mr. Solong. 
When I dreamed up the perfect title for my entry, "Half a liter of petrol...", I
realized that the car was on the wrong side of the road.   Rather than violate
contest rules by flipping the image right/left in a paint program,  I'm
changing the concept to "as seen in a mirror...".

I didn't submit .ZIP file because the IRTC web page kept rejecting my
submission