EMAIL: rjhansen@hotbot.com NAME: RJay Hansen TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Candyworld COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: PovMacUnofficial 3.1 TOOLS USED: Blob Sculptor 1.2, Stephen Andrusyszyn's Spline_Editor, Chris Colefax's Bend.inc, PovMacUnofficial MultiCopy Utility and Adobe Photoshop. RENDER TIME: Parse time: 25 Seconds Render time: 4 hours, 50 minutes, 54 seconds HARDWARE USED: PowerMac 7200/75, 88mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The fabled Golden Ice Cream Cone, legendary source of Eternal Childhood, awaits the intrepid explorer who journeys through the ice cream mountains. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first really big project using POV Ray. I'm not very math literate and so I find Pov to be a real challenge:) I know a lot of my scene and probably objects could be streamlined and made more efficient, but I'm still learning. I avoided figuring out how #while statements worked until I needed to put the mountains in the background. I realized that there was no way I could place them all by hand so I found tutorials on the WWW and learned they were'nt really that difficult. I had a lot of difficulty getting the lighting right and I'm still not happy with it. I didn't use large area lights because my computer is circa late 1995 technology and I wanted to keep rendering time reasonable. Any lighting suggestions or tips would be appreciated. Anyway here's how the various elements were constructed. The plain is a bump map made from a stock photography photo of cake icing. I matched up the opposing edges in Photoshop to make a seamless tile then blurred it and saved it as a targa file for the bump map. The ice cream atop the golden cone was made with Blob Sculpter. I used a cream and chocolate brown marble finish to get a fudge ripple look. The Hershey bars were just CSG objects, using differences and unions. I wanted to emboss the word 'hershey' in them like a real Hershey bar but I got lazy blew it off. The lollipops are more CSG using spheres, boxes and cylinders. I used Chris Colefax's Bend.inc plugin to make the candycanes. I tried it with superellipsoids to get nice rounded edges on the ends but they took too long to render so I just used cylinders instead. The peppermints are superellipsoids. The rest of the candy pieces are lathed objects. The ice cream mountains are blobs. I plotted it out on graph paper and used lots of trial and error:) Before I go I'd like to say a good word about POVMacUnofficial v3.1 I had created most of the candy pieces before Yvo and Rene Smellenbergh had released their unofficial Mac version of POV-Ray 3.1. It has a built-in graphical spline editor which I would have used for the lathed objects. Instead I used Spline_Editor written by Stephen Andrusyzyn. This is a great little program for drawing linear, quadratic and cubic splines for POV lathe or prism objects. Before POVMacUnofficial v3.1, I felt it was indispensable for Mac Pov users, and still is for users of the official Mac version. Anyway, I have great respect and gratitude for Eduard Schwan and the POV Official Mac Team and all the work they've done porting POV Ray to the Mac platform. But I've got to say POVMacUnofficial v3.1 rocks! Besides the graphical spline editor ala Adobe Illustrator it has a graphic color map editor, kind of like a Kai's Gradient Designer for Pov Ray, and fill-in-the-blank templates for POV statements. It's great for Mac Pov users because we don't have the wealth of utilities and modelers that Windows Pov users have available to them. It also renders really fast:) POVMacUnofficial can be found at http://users.skynet.be/smellenbergh/