TITLE: Curiosity
NAME: Nathan O'Brien
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: no13@no13.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.no13.net
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 13kitty.jpg
ZIPFILE: 13kitty.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows. 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    Paintshop Pro, Autocad, Win3d, Texturemagic, Poser 3, Perl.

RENDER TIME: 
    9 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II with 128Mb ram, 1Gb swap space, Nt4 OS

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A kittens first encounter with a mirror and its own reflection. If you have ever
had a kitten for a pet, this is something pretty fun to do. Apparantly animals
can not recognize their own reflection.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my third (and final) attempt to create realistic fur (hair). The macro
used to create the kittens fur is a variation and development on the two
previous attempts. Done in the "nature" and "night" rounds. This version of the
macro uses cones instead of spheres and cylinders and has a density function.
Additional filters were written to change the fur length around the kittens
face and legs. I still use a Perl script to generate the imput code from the
pov mesh.

The ball of wool and logo were created using a modified version of torspline.inc
by Ronald L. Parker. The modifications made were to apply a specific texture
within the macro. This texture used an x+y+z gradient with a scallop_wave.

I wrote a separate macro to create the array used by torspline.inc to create the
ball of wool. This macro wrote the array to file.

As Rhino3D is now commercial I used Win3D to convert the 3DS files created in
Poser3 and Autocad to Pov meshes.

The kitten mesh files was created in Poser3. It was then imported to Autocad
where real POV eyes were located and the mesh was edited for use as the
template for the fur.

Finally the scene was rendered with radiosity. Due to the fur this scene can not
be rendered without radiosity. One of the major problems with this is that
radiosity does not work on the reflection in the mirror. This is why the
reflection is flat. I tried rendering a reflection map and then using it as an
image map on the mirror but was unable to get the right perspective. As time is
running out I'm going to submit the image with a true mirror.