TITLE: Santa Claus palace
NAME: Frank Epple
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: frank.epple@gmx.de
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sanclaus.jpg
ZIPFILE: sanclaus.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRAY 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Terrain Maker, Paint Shop Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    1 42

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166 Mhz, 64 MByte


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Its late february in Santa Claus palace. Its late in
the evening and all lights are burning. You think
Santa Claus and his staff are in holiday? Oh no, they
are doing hard work for the children of this world. If
they want to get ready with the work on all the toys
until next christmas, they have to begin early. Very
early, so they are in holiday only from 25. December
until the 17. January. And so the staff is working hard
on the toys for next christmas.
The hole palace is made of ice and stands on top of an
ice mountain. There are walls around the palace and the
huts of the staff to prevent the toys against intruders
who want to make the children sad and destroy the toys.
But hopefully everything is working wonderful as
every year...

The idea for this image came from the book 'Hogfather' by
Terry Pratchet. In one chapter he describes the palace of
the hogfather. The hogfather is someone like santa claus.
When I read this I got my idea for the imaginary worlds
contest.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The whole scene is created by hand. Only the mountain on which the
castle is standing is made with Terrain Maker.
First I made the walls surrounding the palace. The walls are curved
to look better. The snow on the walls are blobs. Then I made the
towers on the edges of the walls. The are lathe objects. The pinnacles
are cutted out with boolean operations. The snow on the pinnacles are
blob objects too. The huts are superellipsoids to get rounded edges.
In every hut is a lightsource to get the look of busy working inside.
The pinnacles on the palace are made with #while-statements. The
double-spiral-stairs up the santa-tower are made with #while too.