TITLE: Not Quite Stella NAME: Alex Vandiver EMAIL: vandiver@tiac.net WEBPAGE: None that isn't 2 years out of date.. TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: maya.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 with SuperPatch TOOLS USED: sPatch, Lparser, electricity.. RENDER TIME: 20 hours, 52 minutes, 48 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 400 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Of the ruins of the Central American civilization of the Maya, only a few relics remain. Worn, pitted, and broken, the stones of a pillar, or stella, lay scattered on the jungle floor. Ironically, the glyphs inscribed on them read 'A stella was set up, this day..' DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Hrm.. This is my first IRTC entry, so I used a real smorgashboard of methods. The ground is a heightfield; the tree is several heightfields, wrapped into cylinders, placed around a sPatch'd model; the blocks are CSG's, the ferns are basic Lparser ferns. The fiddleheads are strange; they are the rotations, scales, and translations taken from the output of Lparser, but use spheres and cones to connect them. Eash segment is covered with about 170 little semi-transparent cones, to make the 'fur'. There are easier ways, but I didn't have the time to figure 'em out. Just for the heck of it, the water in the pool has media in it, to make patches of floating dirt. The red flowers are sPatch, as is the purple one in the middle. The moss is made of many, many torii, half-imbedded in the heightfield. Throw it all together in some semblence of order, and voila! Not-so-instant history!