TITLE: Unexpected Flight
NAME: Murtaza Amin
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: murtazaamin1@yahoo.com
TOPIC: Epic Proportions
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dandelio.jpg
ZIPFILE: dandelio.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray

TOOLS USED: 
    Irfanview (convert Image), Crossroads (convert 1 model)

RENDER TIME: 
    2h 23m 59s

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 1800XP, 512MB DDR

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


    A backyard can be a jungle of epic proportions, especially if you find
yourself on an unexpected flight away from home, like the (very tiny) subject
of this image.
    I'm sure you will tell me if you think I made the subject too small.  I
think it's funnier this way, plus it gets the 'epic proportions' better.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


    There are 50000 scaled cones for the blades of grass.  The dandelion seeds
consist of (25 cylinders + stalk) * 100 > 2500 primitives per full dandelion
head.  Total primitive shapes = 58328
    Most of it is pretty straightforward, using while loops to multiply and
transform basic shapes.
    I created all textures and objects except the ant itself.  That I imported
from a 3ds file (found on 3dcafe) using Crossroads.
    The included zip file plus Povray is all you need to recreate the scene! 
Funny enough, the smallest object in the image takes up the most space in the
zipfile by far.

Things I learned while making this:

- 50000 cones render a LOT faster than 50000 sphere_sweeps using cubic_spline
- Recursively declaring a shape to include itself and another shape is a bad
idea if you do it 3500 times.