EMAIL: tnishi@ari.ncl.omron.co.jp NAME: Teddy Nishiyama TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievments COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Engineering Olympic Style COUNTRY: Japan WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 for Windows TOOLS USED: Moray, NKflare.inc RENDER TIME: ...I forgot to check but I think it was about 2 hours. HARDWARE USED: 486-100MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: As you all know, the 18th Winter Olympics were held this year in Nagano, Japan and one of the events that stood out was the Speed Skating competitions held at the M-Wave ice rink. This was the first Olympiad where skaters used the new "slap-skates" (or "clap-skates"), where the back part of the skate separates from the heel of the boot and then slaps back into place as the skater pushes off the ice. This new skate is apparently less stable than the older skates and seems to take a bit of getting used to, but when used correctly, it helps the skater transfer more power into their stride as they push off the ice. The separating heel allows the full blade to stay in contact with the ice to get maximum power, where as with the older skates, skaters would end up pushing against the ice with the front edge of the skate at the end of their stride. Though slightly overshadowed by the even newer strips of ...what is it?...plastic? or something, on the head and on the calves of the Norwegian skaters, the slap-skates seem to have contributed to many of the gold medals which were won with record breaking times. Most were won with either Olympic or World records. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The hardest part of this topic was actually coming up with an idea to work with. Well, the Olympics happened to be right there, as were the slap-skates. The olympic rings, the blade of the skate and the medal was pretty straight forward, but the boot of the skate was a problem. I couldn't think of a good way to create it and I'd heard of Rhino and thought that's probably what I needed but since I don't have it, I decided to give a bezier patch a try. After several tries, I finally got a shape that looked pretty much like the boot portion. The "ice" is also quite straight forward...it's just a thinned out cube with a dented white texture. After asking my wife for her opinion, she said I should add a ribbon to the medal...ugh...after the boot, I decided I hate working with bezier patches, but again, I resorted to using another patch for the ribbon. Finally, I added Nathon Koop's nkflare.inc file for the sparkle.