TITLE: Preparing for battle
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmsnow.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmsnow.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC


TOOLS USED: 

    POV-Ray's built-in editor.
    Sketches on paper - yes, I know it's the 21st century.
    DeskDraw to plan out the bears' town
    and Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG.

RENDER TIME: 

    Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes  10.0 seconds (10 seconds)
    Time For Trace:    0 hours 50 minutes   0.0 seconds (3000 seconds)
    Total Time:    0 hours 50 minutes  10.0 seconds (3010 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    Bears wait in their snowfort for the battle to begin again, now that
    most of the earlier snowball has been cleaned off the camera lens.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

    The bears have been around for a while.  The only change I made to
their code this round was to fix a bug in the legs, which meant their
shoes weren't worn properly.  You can't even see they're wearing shoes!
(But they are, because I didn't want their feet to get cold.)

The snowfort was based on memories of Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes cartoons.
It's a blob object.

The church in the background was built for the "Worship" round.  The only
changes made for this round involved converting it from one big scene into
a macro, and commenting out the interior detail.

The shops are a revised version of the shop setting built for the "Insects
& Spiders" round, with all the interior detail removed because it probably
wouldn't have been visible anyway.

The houses are new this round.  The window macro is the same for the shops
and houses, with options to put curtains behind the glass.  However, the
glass is so reflective that it's almost impossible to see that detail.

I liked the idea that an earlier snowball had hit the camera lens.  The
frame is another blob object, combined with text objects to produce the
title credit.  (Ie, it's part of the scene, and not added later.)  The
frame moves with the camera, and almost adjusts to allow for the direction
that the camera is looking in.  The matrix calculations needed to make that
work were taken from a tutorial webpage which has now gone; I would have
credited the author of that page here, but I only have the old URL :-( .
(It used to be at http://www.erols.com/vansickl/matrix.htm )  I don't
understand matrices enough to fix the errors in my code, and had to put
extra rotations and comments in to get it to work.

Most of the textures in this image either come from some of the earlier
teddy bear images or are loosely based on those.  The sky consists of a
sky_sphere and two transparent sky-patterned concentric domes surrounding
the whole scene, and was copied on the last day of the round from my
"Fantasy & Mystic" round's entry, too late to make any corrections to it.

I ought to have put some background bears in, just walking along the
nicely-swept pavements.  Maybe I should even have given one of them a
broom to sweep up the snow.  But I didn't think of it in time, and it's
now after midnight.

Why this image?

1) Well, I like teddy bears, as some people have noticed.

2) Also, two of the ideas I had earlier just seemed at the time like good
ideas based on role-playing games, but after the events of 11th September,
these ideas seemed suddenly symbolic, and I didn't want to work on those ideas.
So I did this image instead, based on a suggestion by Anne McGuire, and
another, SF-inspired, image.