EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com
NAME: Stephen M. Farrell
TOPIC: Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Madame Lazora
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: n/a
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.5
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.5; Paint Shop Pro 7 (for signature and jpg conversion)
RENDER TIME: 4 days 13 hrs 50 min
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 2.53 GHz; 1 GB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

  A fortune-telling machine in a carnival-like setting.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

  The sky - uses the stacked planes technique, which I still haven't gotten the hang of yet.  

  Background elements - almost all simple csg.  I deliberately made the background elements very simplistic, to keep focus on the foreground.  The lamps are lathe objects, and the pennants are simple bicubic patches.

  The booth - mostly csg, with lathes and prisms for some of the trim.  The curtains are isosurface objects using a pigment function.  There is a thin sheet of glass covering the window of the booth, although it doesn't really show up at all.

  The body - most of my time went into creating this, using blobs with a bit of csg.  I'm fairly happy with how it turned out, although it could definitely use some fine-tuning.  The hair doesn't look real, I know, but it would have taken more time than I had to even begin trying to get something better.  The necklace chain is a sphere_sweep, which turned out a lot better than I expected... I thought it would be harder getting it to align with the curvatures of the body, but I think I got it looking pretty good.

  One last note... although the tarot cards don't show up that well in the scene, my intention was to have the four cards correspond to other elements in the scene.  (The Wheel - ferris wheel.  The Sun - sun medallion on necklace.  Strength - the "Test Your Strength" game.  The Moon - the moon.)

  Comments/criticisms appreciated.  Happy holidays to everyone, and good ray-tracing in the year ahead!