TITLE: A God's Birth
NAME: Florian Siegmund
COUNTRY: Austria
EMAIL: hobbes-kuscheltiger@gmx.at
TOPIC: fire and ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: agbirth.jpg
ZIPFILE: agbirth.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows v3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel PhotoPaint 7 (for image maps and conversion to jpeg)

RENDER TIME: 
    10 hours or so?

HARDWARE USED: 
    ACER TravelMate 2203LMi (2.8 GHz, 768 Mb RAM)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A baby in a burning ice bubble floating above a water puddle in an icy cave. A
typical scenery how I imagine that gods are born. I wanted to use soft shadows,
too, but I did not have the time to render this. The area light in the scene
file exists, but it is inside comment brackets, so if someone has enough time
and nerves, he can uncomment it and render the scene again.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The baby is simpler than it looks like. I am sorry that I must disappoint
everyone who expected a highly detailed mesh with a very realistic texture,
because it's just a photograph used as an image map. The background, the fire
and the little cloud are more fascinating though. These were created by using
complex and nested functions in an isosurface and in media. I love to play
around with functions. I also implemented photons in my scene to make it look
more realistic, but as mentioned above, I did not manage to render it with area
lights, focal blur, radiosity a.s.o. in fact of too low CPU speed. Isn't a CPU
always too slow for POV-Ray? :)