TITLE: The First Christmas NAME: Guillermo Espitia Rojas COUNTRY: Colombia EMAIL: gespitia@latino.net.co TOPIC: First Encounter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT JPGFILE: ge_first.jpg ZIPFILE: ge_first.zip RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray Windows 3.02 TOOLS USED: Spatch (head, hands, leaves) Helixir (an adornment) CorelDraw 5 (card, wallpaper) Photopaint 5 (retouch gifs) 3Dwin (conversion head, hands and leaves to meshs) Irfanview (conversion tga to jpg) Texture View RENDER TIME: 12h 33m HARDWARE USED: Pentium 233 Mmx 32 Mb IMAGEN DESCRIPTION: My daughter Paola is 11 month old and this will be her first christmas. At this image I did tried to reflect her expression and her reactions forehead to the tree of christmas. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 1. ORGANIZATION OF THE SCENE At the first time, I made a general portrayal general of the scene with primitives simulating the main objects. With this general scheme I studied alternatives to be located the camera. Once the alternatives were defined I determined than elements would appear into the scene and the degree of detail of the modeling. Afterwards I defined the necessities of illumination of each of the alternatives. The following step consisted in to define the best alternative. With this procedure I avoided to model elements that would not appear inside of the frame of the scene; in this way I saved time and I avoided to waste the resources of my computer. Latterly I divided the scene at four subscenes: the baby, the tree and its adornments, the illumination of the tree, and the gifts. For each one I put a element common: the room. After the subescenas were combined at only one. This process allowed to perform numerous render of test of short durability. 2. BABY The head, the hair, the hands and the dress were modeled with Spatch. The output were done at format DXF, for afterwards to convert it to meshes with 3Dwin. The increase of the perfomance went very important to the change of patches to meshes. The eyes are a couple of spheres of Pov. The lips, the eyebrows and the hair were modeled by separate to make easy the location of textures. The modeling of the head and the hands were performed with the tutorial of Anto Matkovic. This tutorial is one of the best than I have seen in the Web, it is very concise but very complete. ( http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/7415/ ). The texture of the eyes is layered with pattern agate and wood. The textures of the hair and of the dress was made with bumps. 3. TREE At beginning, the leaf at form of needle of the tree was made with bicubic patch (7 points at Spatch). At the tests of the tree, the 32 MB of Ram were not sufficients and after a long parse gave an error. Latterly I modeled the leaf at form of needle with major detail (13 points in Spatch). The output did at format DXF and after it was converted to meshes with 3DWin. At the tests, the time of render was very short (my first experience with meshes). 4. ADORNMENTS For the texture of the balls of christmas I did many tests with negative results. Finally, I finished using something very single, a texture New Brass with modification of the color and the addition of reflection. The texture of a ball was made with texture_map. The ball broken was made with textures only (I didn't make modeled of the edges broken). The ball broken is composed of one difference (CSG) of two concentrics spheres. The texture was made with texture_map, pattern onion, noise with sine_wave and a value of scale very accurate. The textures of the two spheres are equal but with different colors. The socks of christmas are height-fields with image_maps. The gifs were obtained at: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2132/Christmas. One of the adornments was made with the program Helixir. 5. ILLUMINATION The illumination is very single: a main light, a rose light to highlight the face of the baby and lights for the bulbs. At the bulbs I used soft halos. 6. OTHERS In the gifts I used single textures (pattern bozo and leopard), texture_maps (pattern gradient and agate) and image_maps. The wallpaper and the card were drawed with Corel Draw. The texture of the cane was made with pattern spiral1. 7. GRATEFULNESS During the creation of this image my wife Ligia was always present with her suggestions and criticisms. I thank her for her patience and her valuable collaboration. **************************************