TITLE: The Forgotten Bauble NAME: Henry Bush COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: henry@unforgettable.com WEBPAGE: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~hjsb196/ TOPIC: Winter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: bauble.jpg ZIPFILE: bauble.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 Beta 13 for Windows TOOLS USED: None (surprised me too) RENDER TIME: 2 seconds for parse 13 minutes 56 seconds for photons 1 day 6 hours 25 minutes 31 seconds for trace HARDWARE USED: Athlon 650 running at 682MHz, 512Mb, Windows XP with 3Gb swapfile (about 15Mb peak memory usage) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A solitary bauble sits alone in the mid-winter frost on a tree. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Serendipity is the word of the day here. While trying to create a tree encased in ice, I managed to make something that looked more like rimey frost, so I decided to stick with that. I put the house in the back to add some colour and interest to the background, and finally, through encouragement from my housemate Pete, I experimented with adding a bauble. The effect was good, so I left it, and it very much became the focal point of the image. The tree is very regular if zoomed out: it is a splay of sphere sweeps, with some random factor at each junction in order to appear tree-like. To get the idea of the ice, I used a bizarre mixture of a linear sweep and a spline: check out the source, but I'm afraid it's not terribly neat. It took me quite some time to get the texture and the lighting just right. The houses (one in front, one behind) are created by a macro that I'm writing (slowly) to generate random houses. The bauble is as simple as it looks.