TITLE: Stars Above
NAME: Stacy Michelle Haponik
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: paleblue@gmail.com
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: smh_puzz.jpg
ZIPFILE: smh_puzz.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    GIMP, Inkscape

RENDER TIME: 
    17 minutes, 47 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon XP 2500+, 1 gig of RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A puzzle lies upon a plane, nearly complete. Behind it is the box it came in,
propped up by its lid.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The puzzle is a height field on top of a plain rectangular box. The height field
was created using The GIMP's "jigsaw" filter. An image map is laid on the
height field.

The field of stars is a copyright-free image from NASA. It is downloaded from
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_550.html . The image
use guidelines for NASA images are here:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

The sides of the box were drawn in Inkscape. I tweaked all of the imagemaps in
The Gimp.
The texture on the box is a canvas texture created by The Gimp which I applied
to the box as a bump map.

After the final image was rendered, I cropped it using The Gimp.

OTHER NOTES: This is my first entry into the IRTC, and it's been really fun
creating it. I learned alot about how height fields, bump maps, and image maps
function, and why height fields are preferable for forming the shapes of
objects, and bump maps are prefered for adding a textured surface to an object.
I am very pleased with how this image came out, and hope to enter the IRTC
again some time in the future. 

