EMAIL: myles@geocities.com
NAME: Myles Strous
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Seaography Class
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/2468/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows
TOOLS USED: sPatch
RENDER TIME: 13 minutes 11 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-166
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A "school of fish", inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

When I saw the topic "School", I was reminded of Lewis Carroll's 
school in the sea, as expounded to Alice by the Mock Turtle and the
Gryphon - the subjects on the whiteboard are from that source.
I had also started playing around with Mike Clifton's sPatch, a new 
spline-based patch modeller for POV-Ray, with an interface similar
to Hash Inc.'s Animation Master. This image is the result.

The fish were modelled in sPatch, starting off with some basic
lathing and extrusion, followed by hand tweaking of rotations, 
translation, and scaling of points and groups of points.
All the fish parts were kept in the one file on separate layers.

Everything else was done in the text editor of POV-Ray for Windows.
The sandy floor is taken from the ROMAN.POV file of POV-Ray 2.2.
The subjects on the whiteboard are taken from Lewis Carroll's Alice in
Wonderland. Oh, and the whiteboard image-map was done in Fractal Design
Painter, but any paint program could have handled it.

I was purposefully aiming at a cartoony sort of look.

Flaws in the image :
------------------

I wish I'd had more time to spend on their fins.

Late changes in lighting seem to have partly obscured the hexagonal
scale pattern that was originally quite clear on the fish. I didn't notice
this until the final render.

I'd originally intended to have seats for the students, and objects in the
background (seaweed, rocks, coral, other sea denizens), but as usual
my plans were more grandiose than my time allowed. I kind of like the
uncluttered look that resulted though.

Credits - this image would not have been possible without :
-------

- the POV-Team (http://www.povray.org), for providing POV-Ray to an unworthy
and at times ungrateful world. A special note of thanks to Chris Cason for
his Windows port.

- Mike Clifton, for providing such a wonderful modeller for POV-Ray 
(see http://users.aimnet.com/~clifton/spatch/spatch.html).

- Hash, Inc. (http://www.hash.com) and the users of Hash software, who 
provided me with the introduction to spline modelling that enabled me to 
make ready use of sPatch, even at my limited skill level.

- and never forgetting my beautiful and beloved girlfriend Pam, for
patiently putting up with yet more romantic neglect while I played with
this image.


Final Verbosity
---------------

If this image makes you smile, even if only in comparison to the
other more professional images in the competition, then it's done
its job. Have a nice day.