TITLE: Asia's range
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmasia.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmasia.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 

    POV-Ray's built-in editor,
    and Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG.

RENDER TIME: 

    Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes   4.0 seconds (4 seconds)
    Time For Trace:    0 hours 11 minutes  30.0 seconds (690 seconds)
    Total Time:        0 hours 11 minutes  34.0 seconds (694 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    Animals representing some of the Asian countries.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

While trying to think of an approach to this round's theme, I looked at
maps of Asia, and thought of the idea of costumed soft toy animals that
would represent some of the countries.

This idea turned out to be too ambitious for me to actually complete;
I spent too long revising the bears to work with a new method of
costuming them, so none of the animals are wearing costumes.

The list of national animals I'd planned to use in this scene was
(alphabetically): China - panda, India - tiger, Japan - fox, Malaysia
- tiger, Mongolia - horse, Nepal - snow leopard, Sri Lanka - lion,
Taiwan - lion, Thailand - white elephant, Tibet - yak.

I put my old favourite teddy bears in as placeholders, and started
working through the list of animals.  Firstly I did the fox (meant to
represent a fox-headed Oni, and left over from an earlier idea for the
round, which would only have featured Japan).  Secondly, I did a tiger,
as two countries have chosen that as their national animal.  Thirdly,
I realised how close it was to the deadline, and that I had no chance of
getting the other animals done - oops.

So this is submitted as a work-in-progress... hopefully it can get some
points for the concept, at least.

Oh, the mat the animals are standing on is textured to have a woven pattern,
like some of the previous textures in teddy bear scenes.  So it's _meant_
to look like that.

Do I need to mention that the animals are standing in about the right
locations of the countries' capital cities?

This scene rendered so fast, I tried it again with radiosity, which I've
never had much success with before.  The jpeg submitted here is the
version with radiosity - see the zipfile for the settings used.  The
zipfile also includes closeups of the fox and tiger, which may not look
great, but are at least more detailed than you can tell from the final
image.

Lastly, this is my first portrait-format entry.  It seemed to fit the
proportions of the Asian continent better that way.