TITLE: "Encounter at the North Pole"
NAME: Nicholas W. Porter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: porternw@slu.edu
WEBPAGE: NoneJPGFILE: nppolar.jpg
ZIPFILE: nppolar.zip

TOPIC: First Encounters
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard Raytracing Competition copyright.
JPGFILE: nppolar.jpg
ZIPFILE: nppolar.zip
RENDERER USED: 

        POV-Ray 3.1


TOOLS USED: 

        sPatch, Photoshop 5 (jpg conversion and height_field)


RENDER TIME: 

        6 hr 38 min 


HARDWARE USED: 

        Pentium 166 MMX, 72 M RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


When I first began thinking of an image to do for the competition,
I knew I wanted to incorporate a little bit of a Christmas theme
into it as well.  This image does require a little bit of explaining, 
(you might ask what a dolphin is doing in the north pole) 
So thus were born the characters of Bob the Bear, and Gary the Dolphin...
   
   On Christmas Eve, Bob the Bear was walking down to his favorite pool
for a nice moonlit swim.  He had just dipped his toe into the water when
the strangest looking creature that he had ever seen popped above the 
surface.  The creature explained that he was Gary the Dolphin, and that 
he was looking for Santa Claus.  You see, Gary had learned way down south
in the Bahamas that Santa was desperately in need of someone to lead his
sleigh.  Evidently, some of the reindeer had been playing too many of 
their reindeer-games, and had caughten colds, so there was a definite
shortage of reindeer.  So, being the responsible dolphin that he is, Gary
had swam all the way to the North Pole to give Santa a hand (or a flipper,
as the case may be).  Fortunately for Santa (and rather unfortunately for
Gary), Mrs. Claus had made some of her special chicken soup, and the 
reindeer were ready to go just in time.  
        


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Being my first entry to the competition (also the first image that 
I have spent any time at all on), everything here is pretty simple.
  I started off with the modelling of the polar bearand dolphin in 
sPatch, and then began to work on a scene to put them in.  I created 
a height field in Photoshop, and then scaled and translated it to get 
just the perspective that I wanted. The sky is a sphere with a starfield
texture.  The moon is a sphere with a bozo color map applied to it--it 
took a LOT of translating and sizing to get it just how I wanted it.
The ground is simply a box with a hole cut in it for the water, which 
is a plane.  The edge of ground, which wouldn't accept any of the texture 
of the surface of the ground, was then created using a hollow sphere to 
which I chopped of the tops and bottoms of, and then applied the texture 
that I wanted.  The ripples in the water are actually spheres that are 
just breaking surface of the water, which then nicely fade off as it 
descends into the water.  I then added the finishing touches of the image 
map of Santa and his reindeer flying across the moon, and the igloo off 
in the background.  The smoke from the campfire was particularly difficult 
for me to figure out, being rather new to all of this, but I think it 
came out okay.  The image as a whole isn't meant to be entirely photo-
realistic, but rather, a little "cartoonish."

