EMAIL:  bobandholly@mindspring.com
NAME:  Bob Clawges
TOPIC:  Magic
COPYRIGHT:  I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:  Hat Trick
COUNTRY:  USA
WEBPAGE:  n/a
RENDERER USED:  POVRay V3.01.msdos.wat-cwa
TOOLS USED:  Moray V2.5b.wat shareware (build 547)
RENDER TIME:  7 hours 14 minutes
HARDWARE USED:  100MHz Pentium
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
     The trappings of the classic stage magician...
     A top hat, a black and white wand, and playing cards
     (not necessarily ONE of each kind!)
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
     The cards and the brim of the hat were the hardest parts of this image.
The cards are scaled cubes with four superellipsoids subtracted from the corners
to make them rounded off.  The brim of the top hat is a 6x4 planar Bezier patch
which I hand-adjusted into a Pringle-shape (which was exactly the shape I was
looking for for the brim, anyway).  The cards are (of course) bitmaps which I
made in Windows Paintbrush (if you can believe that anyone still uses that).
Because there are some pretty subtle, but necessary, contrasts in the woodgrain
and at the edges of the cards, I rendered this with antialiasing at .0005 instead
of .003 and with 9x9 supersampling.
     All textures and objects in this scene were hand-crafted with loving care
in about twenty hours or so.  Anything you like from the sources may be copied
and used freely in your own files.  I only ask that if you use my stuff, you send
me a web address for your pic so I can see it put to use!