TITLE: "Peanuts"
NAME: Marco Semprini
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: marcos@nt.lan.iper.net
TOPIC: Childhood
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: peanuts.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV3WIN ISOsurface Beta 17 (POV-Ray 3.02 unoffical patch)

TOOLS USED: 
    POVLAB 4.0 SP2, sPatch 1.0, HF-LAB 0.84, LParser 4.0, 3Dto3D 1.7
            CorelDraw 5.0,  Aldus Photoshop 4.0

RENDER TIME: 
    1 Hour 49 Minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    PC (Pentium Intel 200 Mhz/98 Mb EDO Ram/ET6000 4 Mb MDRAM)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Those Lovely "Peanuts" Characters......

    I know the following concept might sound as an incredible commonplace,
    but.... "Snoopy" and its friends represented to me a "funny and
    thoughtless" childhood!
    One of the first "peluche" puppets i had (i love'em yet  :P  ) was
    nothing less than "Snoopy", a good play mate.  :)

    Charles M. Shulz has created some of the funniest characters in the
    "toon" world, and this is a tribute of mine to his work!


RENDERING MUSIC:

    Taking example from Glenn McCarter (greetings to him), i suggest to
    view this image listening an appropriate "soundtrack", in module format,
    to be freely downloadable from everyone.

    "Child" by Nutcase (Nov. 96)       - XM Fasttracker II format -

    available at:

    ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos/music/songs/1996/n/nc-child.zip

    (p.s. - this is not a remix of Miles' "Children"!!!!)



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


    There was no "storyboard" about this image!
    I created first some "Peanuts" characters (see below for more details);
    than i decided to recreate the world they live in!
    My aim was **NOT** to make an iper.photo.realistic image: "Snoopy" is
    not transposed from its usual 2D world to "our" 3D world; but, on the
    exact contrary, i tried to **ENTER INTO** its world, that appears to
    our eyes as a 2D world!
    Clear, isn't it !? ...or not!?


    (Main modeller)

    The main used program is the great Denis Olivier's POVLAB 3D modeller!


    (In order of creation)

    Snoopy            - This is my 6th object modelled using the incredible
                        Mike Clifton's sPatch 1.0 (c) freeware utility, and
                        it's composed by 2281 patches.
                        The resulting patches (in POV file format) were then
                        converted into POVLAB file format using my freeware
                        utility Bez2Scn 1.2 (available at the POVLAB ftp
                        site: <http://www.povlab.org>).
                        I've also found some useful tips & tricks reading
                        the Anto Matkovic's "Head Tutorial" for sPatch!

    Woodstock         - Basically it's similar to Snoopy, with some proper
                        adjustements. It's composed by 1272 patches!
                        It was really funny to work with its head, using
                        the sPatch "noise" tool.  :P

    Dog's House       - They were modelled within POVLAB, using the "extruder"
    and the Houses      tool, and some CSG operations. The 3D name of the
                        Dog's House is simply an height_field of a Targa
                        created with CorelDraw 5.0, using its "text
                        allignment along a curve" feature!

    The Grass         - It's an height_field (very very low) created with
                        John P. Beale's HF-Lab 0.84 Beta (c) utility, mapped
                        with a tiled image found on some Internet textures
                        site!

    The Edge          - Both these objects were modelled using sPatch: for
    and the Dog's Cup   the first one, the outline was modelled manually and
                        then extruded and scaled; the second one is simply
                        a lathe object of the outline!

    The Bushes        - These plants were created with Laurens Lapre's
                        LParser 4.0, using directly some LSYS commands, and
                        then exported into RAW format to be loaded into
                        POVLAB modeller.

    The Tree Shadow   - The shadow of the tree in the bottom left side is
                        generated by a 32 bit Targa, using the alpha channel,
                        this last one created within Aldus Photoshop 4.0.

    The Trees         - The Trees are converted 3DS meshes i've found on the
                        great graphic site <3D Cafe>. I've converted them
                        in RAW format using Thomas Baier's 3Dto3D 1.7 (c)
                        utility.

    The Kite          - Another object modelled with sPatch and converted
                        into SCN file format (POVLAB format). The rope
                        around the pale took me some time to model, but
                        i hope it worth the trouble.
                        The presence of the hanged "kite" is due the total
                        incapacity of Charlie Brown to make a kite fly
                        An entire "Peanuts" chapter is dedicated to this, and
                        it's really cheerful! A must_have!  =)

    All the other    - All the other objects were modelled with POVLAB, using
    objects            standard POV-Ray primitives.



LAST "TECHNICAL" INFO

    Total number of objects in the scene: 5189.
    POV source file size................: 9 Mb (without maps, of course)!
    "Peak Memory" reached during the
    rendering session...................: 92 Mb!!!!


                                            Marco "tHe DReAMeR" Semprini


