TITLE: Winter's First Breath NAME: Robert J Becraft COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: castlewrks@aol.com WEBPAGE: http://user.aol.com/castlewrks http://www.angelfire.com/md2/castlewrks TOPIC: Winter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: winter1.jpg ZIPFILE: winter1.zip RENDERER USED: POV 3.1g TOOLS USED: IView32 (JPG conversion), PSP (Adding copyright), POSER, UVMapper, OBJ2POV RENDER TIME: 8 hours 38 minutes, 102 Meg of memory HARDWARE USED: Pentium 433 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: As always, I tie this to my medieval D&D world... It is the winter solstice festival and market in a small town. Under the White and Gray towers in the town's central square, shoppers are surprised by the winters first snow. One of the younger ladies is very happy and twirls in the open space. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All of the buildings, booths, and booth objects were created in raw POV. Random loops are used for size, color and contents of the booths. I'm especially proud of the baskets... they are composed of actual weaves and hold up very nicely to closeup tracing. All of the figures were built in POSER and generated as an image on a black background. They are included as imagemaps on squares. The snow was created in Windows paint program with the aid of the spray feature. White flakes were sprayed on a black background with the right density to give the intended effect. If you look closely, you will find layers of snow, the ones farther back are restricted by the pel size of the image. When you include imagemaps where you are making the background invisible, you will need max_trace_level in the global_settings below to ensure that you don't get black patches where the ray stops penetrating multiple layers of imagemaps. The final image was done with only one of each of the 4 lights on on the lampposts... the first attempt with the whole boat was shaping up to be about 80 hours worth of render time. Ding notice: Poser is surprisingly lacking in winter medieval objects... so those ladies in the front of the image are only slightly clothed, they are tough medieval wenches. I probably spent more time surfing for more clothing than I did in making all the rest of the image.