EMAIL: 71524.2020@compuserve.com
NAME: Thomas J. Hruska
TOPIC: SUMMER
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray v3.0 beta 7a for Win32s and Win95
TOOLS USED: Quick Pov v0.1, some graph paper, a calculator, and my brain
RENDER TIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
HARDWARE USED: 486DX2/66, 8MB RAM, 14.4K baud modem
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  Playground took a really LOOOONNNGGG time to make and render...why?  Just
because the image has 106 different objects!  My favorite part of the picture
is the swing set since it reminds me of childhood and little things that kids
like to do, I was going to render the image with a little kid swinging on it
but I ran out of time.  Use this image as windows background and share it
with your friends.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  Playground started out as an extremely dumb image (at least in my mind it
did), since the entire picture WAS going to be just a bunch of little pieces
of glass grass going from here to forever...anyway, I decided to start with
the grass using my favorite program, Quick Pov v0.1, I inserted a sphere for
the sun, then I added a plane for the ground to simulate mud, then a prism
for the grass particle.  Since I didn't know how to do colormaps I needed one
for the perfect glass but grass-like texture...so I found it in a pov-ray
source code file, LASER.POV.  I took the colormap for the green glass tube
and used it with a Candy_Cane texture and got the perfect piece of grass...
but something was wrong, the grass had a flat top, so the only way that would
be the fastest to render the grass would be using a triangle mesh, now the
grass looks nice, but one piece of grass only?  I wanted a field of grass,
not one piece, so I made a bunch of #declare statements to give me my field
of grass.  Perfect, now I just need some sky, okay use a sphere and scale
a Blue_Sky pattern to the right size.  Okay, now I need the sun, add a halo
from the Pov-help for windows file...hey, I'm a beginner at this so forgive
me for breathing if I need help the first time around?!?!  Okay, now position
and scale the halo so it looks like it is coming from behind the clouds.
Good, now it looks empty still...even though I have filled 50% of my picture
already (with grass).  Wait!  I have it!  Add a swing set...okay, put the
gold sphere bases in, center the top golden spheres, add 5 Candy_Cane
cylinders and rotate the top pigment one.  Great, now I need to make the
chains for the swing, I use a torus that is stretched across the Z axis, then
I move it up to the support metal cylinder at the top...Brushed_Aluminum is a
GREAT texture for this part, next I build my links up and then I am ready for
the swing.  I decided to use a prism for this, since I want smooth I use the
quadratic option, and I build my chair out of Cherry_Wood.  Great!  However,
there is something missing, I thought hard on this for days and decided that
I really should make this a playground in the summer and so I came up with a
Jungle Gym made out of blobs, I finally learned how to make colormaps so I
came up with the nifty red blue purple pattern with turbulence to give it a
wild look.  The image is finally done after 7 hard days of work, I build my
text file, render the final image, translate to JPEG using Quality=91, and
create a ZIP file for the source code and this text file.

Enjoy,
Serpent Eye Software's president
Thomas J. Hruska