EMAIL: porternw@slu.edu NAME: Nicholas W. Porter TOPIC: First Encounters COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard Raytracing Competition copyright. TITLE: "Encounter at the North Pole" COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None JPGFILE: nppolar.jpg ZIPFILE: nppolar.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: sPatch, Photoshop 5 (jpg conversion and height_field) RENDER TIME: 6 hr 38 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166 MMX, 72 M RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: When I first began thinking of an image to do for the competition, I knew I wanted to incorporate a little bit of a Christmas theme into it as well. This image does require a little bit of explaining, (you might ask what a dolphin is doing in the north pole) So thus were born the characters of Bob the Bear, and Gary the Dolphin... On Christmas Eve, Bob the Bear was walking down to his favorite pool for a nice moonlit swim. He had just dipped his toe into the water when the strangest looking creature that he had ever seen popped above the surface. The creature explained that he was Gary the Dolphin, and that he was looking for Santa Claus. You see, Gary had learned way down south in the Bahamas that Santa was desperately in need of someone to lead his sleigh. Evidently, some of the reindeer had been playing too many of their reindeer-games, and had caughten colds, so there was a definite shortage of reindeer. So, being the responsible dolphin that he is, Gary had swam all the way to the North Pole to give Santa a hand (or a flipper, as the case may be). Fortunately for Santa (and rather unfortunately for Gary), Mrs. Claus had made some of her special chicken soup, and the reindeer were ready to go just in time. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Being my first entry to the competition (also the first image that I have spent any time at all on), everything here is pretty simple. I started off with the modelling of the polar bearand dolphin in sPatch, and then began to work on a scene to put them in. I created a height field in Photoshop, and then scaled and translated it to get just the perspective that I wanted. The sky is a sphere with a starfield texture. The moon is a sphere with a bozo color map applied to it--it took a LOT of translating and sizing to get it just how I wanted it. The ground is simply a box with a hole cut in it for the water, which is a plane. The edge of ground, which wouldn't accept any of the texture of the surface of the ground, was then created using a hollow sphere to which I chopped of the tops and bottoms of, and then applied the texture that I wanted. The ripples in the water are actually spheres that are just breaking surface of the water, which then nicely fade off as it descends into the water. I then added the finishing touches of the image map of Santa and his reindeer flying across the moon, and the igloo off in the background. The smoke from the campfire was particularly difficult for me to figure out, being rather new to all of this, but I think it came out okay. The image as a whole isn't meant to be entirely photo- realistic, but rather, a little "cartoonish."