TITLE: SnoBild, Inc.
NAME: Peter D. Dunlap
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: pdunlap@fcsg.com
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: snobuild.jpg
ZIPFILE: snobuild.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.5 for Windows


TOOLS USED: 
    MakeTree macro by Gilles Tran, for snowman arms and (of course) the
tree
            Photoshop 5 to add the signature and convert to Jpeg


RENDER TIME: 
    11 14 (800x600 AA0.3)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4, 1.9GHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A snowman being constructed by a bunch of little snowmen.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I've been following the IRTC topics for some time, but could never come up with
a good idea for a picture that I thought I could do.  I was fiddling around
with a snowman in POV, and had an inspiration.  I told a friend, and he told
me I was weird.  But I went ahead anyway.  Unfortunately, I had this
inspiration
just two weeks before the deadline...

The ground snow is a pattern-function-based height field.  That and the balls
of snow all have some normal fiddling to give them a less-perfect appearance.
The little snowmen are generated by a macro that adds some variation to the
size and shape of the balls, so they don't all appear the same.

The snowmen arms were generated by the MakeTree macro, and the tree itself was
done with a modified version of the macro to add the snow (a less than perfect
solution, but it worked out ok here).

The falling snow is a variation on the technique used in the March-April 2002
round by Christophe Bouffartigue (A Frisky Winter), with a series of thin
vertical mostly-transparent layers with a spattering of white texture.

The rest of the scene is just CSG stuff.

I would have liked to add a bit of texture to the sky and perhaps a house at
the edge of the scene, but I was running into the limits of both time and my
POV expertise.