TITLE: Wishing for Spring
NAME: John Bradshaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: johnkbradshaw@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: spring.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Wings 0.94, Pov-ray, UV mapper

RENDER TIME: 
    20 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1.2Ghz, 768Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The idea for this one came one dreary winter day several weeks ago. The only
thing about Winter that I could think about was how much I wanted Spring to
come. Perhaps it was just too cold in my house (which is an older house with
inadequate insulation). So this image is perhaps is a Winter Self-portrait.

I wanted to make an image that reflected my winter outlook that day in kind of a
cartoony (but not cel-shaded cartoony, more pixarish) style.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Pine trees (which are perhaps my favorite part) were made with a macro placing
several thousand cones modified with a little randomness in the length and
color.

Falling snow is an isosurface randomly placed.

The snow is a height field generated in pov-ray.

The snowman originally was made of blobs and isosurfaces. I really liked how it
looked, but it took forever to render, so I ended up modeling the snowman and
heater in Wings. Render time dropped to about 1/3 and the resulting image was
very similar to the isosurface snowman. Export was done with the pov export
plugin for Wings and hand tweaked. UV map for the heater was generated with UV
mapper and painted in photoshop. The decision to model in Wings worked out
well, as placing the heater, cord and snowman in relation with each other would
have been more difficult otherwise

The only parts of the isosurface snowman that I retained were the eyebrows and
the left mitten. The mitten needed to be a 3d object instead of a patch/mesh
object to make my intersection/pressing against the glass idea work, and the
eyebrows are a couple of hundred cylinders each which was much easier to code
vs model.

The 20 hour render time is mainly due to the focal blur (variance 0)