TITLE: Ice Cream!
NAME: Chris Hernandez
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: chrish@rivernet.com.au
WEBPAGE: pending - will eventually be in www.rivernet.com.au/~chrish
TOPIC: Childhood
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: icecream.jpg
ZIPFILE: icecream.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.02 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Sonya Roberts trees v3.0, lots of Smirnoff Blue Label

RENDER TIME: 
    18 hrs 28 mins


HARDWARE USED: 


   - 486DX2-80 clone (a.k.a. "ol' paperweight") for writing scene
   - Toshiba 440CDT (P166MMX, 16MB) laptop borrowed from my dad for final
render(s).



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


    It's the end of a long day. It's hot. The kind of heat Venutians would feel
warm in.
    It's muggy. The kind of humidity meteorologists get excited about. We're
sitting 
    in the front yard doing our best not to melt. The sun sinks slowly over the
horizon.

    "Hey, you guys wanna play handball?"
    "Nah. The tennis ball burst into flames about half an hour ago."
    "Oh yeah."
    "How 'bout we get some squish......"

    Wait a minute...  What's that sound?
    Oh my God...  It can't be...  It IS!!!
    ICE CREAM!

    "Ice cream man! Ice cream! Wait ice cream man! Ice cream!!!!"



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


    This entire scene was created by hand. No modellers here, ma'am! Each
element was
    developed by itself before I put them all together in the final scene.

    In an extension to the topic, the 2 houses you see in the background are
the
    houses that my parents and I have lived in during my childhood. The house on
the 
    right (red brick single storey) was the first house my family bought here in

    Australia. The other is the house that they still live in.

    They are all CSG objects (like all the elements in the scene). Since they
were
    going to be in the midground, I decided to economize on computation and
built
    the plants in then garden with simple objects, and let the textures do most
of the
    work. Likewise, the grass in the yards are simple object given a fairly
radical
    normal.

    For the grass in the foreground I needed a little bit more detail, so I
created
    them out of joined height fields and pigment_maps. The bush in the
foreground
    was created with Sonya Roberts tree include file v3.0. Many thanks and also

    kudos to Sonya for this great file.

    The trees in the background are GIFs mapped onto very thin boxes. The GIF's
were from
    Axem textures at axem2.simplenet.com. Again, this was done for economy
reasons, as I
    run a fairly slow computer. As it is, my 486 flaked out and crashed during
the final
    scene integration renders. I left the thing running for 4 days on just one
render,
    and it collapsed into a quivering heap. I had to borrow my dads P166 laptop
to finish
    off the scene. (The final render took 18 and 1/2 hrs on the Pentium, and it
renders an
    average of 10 to 15 times faster than my 486...).

    The clouds are based on Darin Dugger's "Kite Clouds" in skies.inc. I fooled
around
    with the maps and scaling a little to make it look like late
afternoon/sunset type
    clouds. I didnt like the way the clouds looked bunched up on the horizon, so
I added
    a very thin fog to fade things out at infinity. (I *love* the way Bryce2
renders do
    this.... anyone know how to replicate the effect with POV?)

    Just lying off camera are some elements such as a wooden paling fence and
the shell
    of another house. I'd hoped that these would give a little interplay of
shadow and
    light in the scene, but I couldnt quite get it to work as well as I'd hoped.
<sigh>

    While we're on that train of thought, the arms in the scene are blocky and
unconvincing,
    but I thought that the scene really suffered without them. I think that I
could have
    improved them given time, but I just couldnt gather enough time over the
Christmas
    holidays. Probably a mistake to make them out of primitives rather than
blobs. <double sigh>

    I got the picture of the ice cream cone from ABC online at www.abc.net.au.
It's a
    picture from the cover of an album called "Triple J's Hottest 100 vol 3". By
the way,
    the licence plate of the truck was POV-301. A bit small to see clearly, but
I thought
    it quite amusing.
   







