TITLE: Candyworld
NAME: RJay Hansen
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rjhansen@hotbot.com
WEBPAGE: 

TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: candywor.jpg
ZIPFILE: candywor.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovMacUnofficial 3.1


TOOLS USED: 
    Blob Sculptor 1.2, Stephen Andrusyszyn's Spline_Editor, Chris
Colefax's Bend.inc,
PovMacUnofficial MultiCopy Utility and Adobe Photoshop.


RENDER TIME: 
    Parse time 25 Seconds
           Render time: 4 hours, 50 minutes, 54 seconds


HARDWARE USED: 
    PowerMac 7200/75, 88mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    The fabled Golden Ice Cream Cone, legendary source of Eternal
Childhood,
awaits the intrepid explorer who journeys through the ice cream mountains.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This is my first really big project using POV Ray. I'm not very math literate
and so I find Pov to be a real challenge:)
I know a lot of my scene and probably objects could be streamlined and made more
efficient,
but I'm still learning. I avoided figuring out how #while statements worked
until I 
needed to put the mountains in the background. I realized that there was no way
I could
place them all by hand so I found tutorials on the WWW and learned they were'nt
really
that difficult.
I had a lot of difficulty getting the lighting right and I'm still not happy
with it.
I didn't use large area lights because my computer is circa late 1995
technology
and I wanted to keep rendering time reasonable. Any lighting suggestions or tips

would be appreciated.
Anyway here's how the various elements were constructed.

The plain is a bump map made from a stock photography photo of cake icing.
I matched up the opposing edges in Photoshop to make a seamless tile then
blurred
it and saved it as a targa file for the bump map.

The ice cream atop the golden cone was made with Blob Sculpter. I used a cream
and chocolate brown marble finish to get a fudge ripple look.

The Hershey bars were just CSG objects, using differences and unions. I wanted
to emboss
the word 'hershey' in them like a real Hershey bar but I got lazy blew it off.

The lollipops are more CSG using spheres, boxes and cylinders.

I used Chris Colefax's Bend.inc plugin to make the candycanes. I tried it with
superellipsoids
to get nice rounded edges on the ends but they took too long to render so I just
used
cylinders instead.

The peppermints are superellipsoids. The rest of the candy pieces are lathed
objects.
The ice cream mountains are blobs.

I plotted it out on graph paper and used lots of trial and error:)

Before I go I'd like to say a good word about POVMacUnofficial v3.1
I had created most of the candy pieces before Yvo and Rene Smellenbergh had
released 
their unofficial Mac version of POV-Ray 3.1. It has a built-in graphical spline
editor
which I would have used  for the lathed objects. Instead I used Spline_Editor
written
by Stephen Andrusyzyn. This is a great little program for drawing linear,
quadratic and
cubic splines for POV lathe or prism objects. Before POVMacUnofficial v3.1, I
felt it
was indispensable for Mac Pov users, and still is for users of the official Mac
version.

Anyway, I have great respect and gratitude for Eduard Schwan and the POV
Official Mac Team 
and all the work they've done porting POV Ray to the Mac platform. But I've got
to say
POVMacUnofficial v3.1 rocks! Besides the graphical spline editor ala Adobe
Illustrator
it has a graphic color map editor, kind of like a Kai's Gradient Designer for
Pov Ray,
and fill-in-the-blank templates for POV statements. It's great for Mac Pov
users
because we don't have the wealth of utilities and modelers that Windows Pov
users have
available to them. It also renders really fast:)
POVMacUnofficial can be found at http://users.skynet.be/smellenbergh/