TITLE: Downhill Racer
NAME: Bob Chmilnitzky
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jjaguar@worldnet.att.net
WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~chmilnir
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dhracer.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MegaPOV 0.7

TOOLS USED: 
    HamaPatch 2.5, Moray 3.3a, TerraGen 0.8, Paint Shop Pro 5.

RENDER TIME: 
    7 hours, 22 minutes, 55 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6-2 300mhz, 320 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


An alpine downhill racer gets airborne over a jump during the World Cup race at
Fang Valley.

During the Salt Lake Olympics, I was watching the alpine racers flying over
jumps at 80+ mph in the Downhill and Super G events and thought that would make
a great image.  When I saw this round's topic, I knew instantly what I wanted
to do.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Most of the work for this image went into the skier.  This was my first attempt
at modelling a person and while I'm still not 100% satisfied, I'm generally
pleased with how it turned out.

The skier was modeled almost entirely in HamaPatch.  I started on the face,
using Anto Matkovic's head tutorial as reference.  Since it is enclosed in a
helmet, I didn't need to make the entire head.  The body and limbs were made in
a similar manner to the face - I sketched some guidelines in one layer and
using them as a reference, I built up the model from extruded and shaped
circles.  I made the limbs for the left side first, then mirrored them to the
right and tweaked them a little bit into slightly different positions so they
wouldn't look simply mirrored.  The hands were made by tracing out a hand
shape, extruding that, and bending the fingers around the pole handles.

I also used Hamapatch to model the downhill course, fencing, and the gate flag. 
These were all simply made up of planes and boxes, stretched and bent into
shape.  This was all exported to Moray, where the scene was assembled and
textured.

The hills in the background are heightfields generated in Terragen.  To make the
distant trees, I made a copy of the terrain heightfield and added some noise in
PSP to create some spikes.  I sunk this heightfield a few feet below the
ground, leaving the spikes poking up through the ground to represent pine
trees.

I used Paint Shop Pro to draw the textures.  The sponsor logos were downloaded
from various sources on the internet and colorized, posterized, or otherwise
modified in various ways to make them work.  The bird on the helmet is "Feng
Huang", a Chinese mythological bird similar to the western world's Phoenix.

The sky sphere was written by hand as a separate .inc file.  Just a blue sky
with some thin, whispy, high altitude clouds.  Motion blur is a feature of
MegaPov, and the motion blur on the ski poles was done by editing the .pov file
by hand after exporting it from Moray.  I was very tempted to go nuts with the
motion blur, but I think this is a case of "less is more" so I just blurred the
poles to give the impression that they were being whipped around and provide a
sense of motion to the image.

The final render was converted to .jpg in PSP.  There is a bit of a circular
banding/Moire pattern in the fence texture that is an artifact of jpeg
conversion.  It was not present in the original .png.