TITLE: Skiing NAME: Maarten Hofman COUNTRY: USA (Originally the Netherlands) EMAIL: maarten_hofman@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: http://people.zeelandnet.nl/whhofman/jen TOPIC: Frozen Moment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: skiing.jpg ZIPFILE: skiing.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: * Adobe Photoshop 6.0 (to convert to JPG/PNG and to create one of the height fields) * WinZip (to create the zip file) RENDER TIME: 1 31 HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 1.8 GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: At one time, my friend and I were skiing. He decided to try a jump, and it went quite well, until one of his skis suddenly fell down. He did not manage to land properly on one ski, but he wasn't hurt either. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I like programming all the objects myself in the POVRAY scene language, which I did again here. There were a number of issues, which are mentioned here with their resolution: 1. Focus on the falling ski. Originally I tried to do this using focal blur (which is still in the source file if you want to try it). However, I don't like focal blur, as it makes it seem like you're hiding something. Instead I made sure there were no distracting objects around the ski itself. 2. Mountains. I spend quite some time finding a good texture for the mountains. I gave the idea of vegetation by giving it a green ambient and added a gradient and bozo for the spots where the snow had melted. 3. People. This is the first raytrace in which I tried to put a person. It is made of superellipsoids with a rough texture. 4. Detail. Currently there are a skilift, a food place and pick nick tables. A tree would've been nice, but was difficult to place (see 1). 5. Spray. The spray was made using a program in pike, which created random snowflakes and calculated their path using a simulated gravity. I did try the picture with softer shadows, but for some reason I prefer the sharp ones, despite them being less realistic. I guess it is just the way I raytrace.