TITLE: The Hottub
NAME: Rob Fitzel
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: rfitzel@rogers.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.fitzel.ca/dart/
TOPIC: Fire and Ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rfhottub.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.6, PoseRay v3.8.9.369, DAZ|Studio v1.2.0.0, Wings3D
v0.98.32a, Paint Shop Pro v8.0

RENDER TIME: 
    21h 9m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 3GHz 2GB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

At last year's Christmas party some of my co-workers went hottubbing outdoors. I
thought that might qualify as a fire and ice hot vs. cold contrast. This image
is NOT a representation of my co-workers. :-)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The fence, shovel, and hottub are pure CSG. The houses are generated by a set of
CSG macros where all the window/door locations, sizes, styles, etc are passed
in as parameters. The vinyl siding is actually just a slope_map trick which
works well with the lighting in this scene. Unfortunately, I wrote the macros
in a very messy manner. Once I rewrite them, I'll post them if anyone is
interested.

The trees are Lightwave Object (.OBJ) files downloaded from xfrog public plants
(http://web.inf.tu-dresden.de/ST2/cg/downloads/publicplants/) and converted to
mesh2 with PoseRay. I excluded the leaves when exporting to POV-Ray, reducing
the mesh size by about half and decreasing the render time a great deal.  I
then mapped a seamless bark image around the whole thing.

The snow on the branches was done by having PoseRay export some of the branches
of the same tree and texturing them as snow covered. This "partial tree" was
then placed at the same location as the original but slightly offset so that
the snow covered branches would "stick out" a bit from the bare branches.

The blue spruce uses flat triangles for the branches with image_maps of a fir
branch applied.  I painted on a bit of white onto the branch image to simulate
snow.

The water is an isosurface with a granite based texture for the foam. It looks
okay from a distance, but not that great in a closeup. I randomly scattered
bubbles on the water surface using discs whose normal was pointed at the
camera. The steam clouds are based on the makecloud2 technique described by
Gilles Tran (http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/english/sources13.htm).  The
clouds doubled the render time, but added a subtle hint of heat.

I originally had snow flakes falling about the scene, but couldn't make them
convincing. Making them somewhat transparent (to simulate blur) left artifacts
because of the steam cloud. I experimented with focal blur, but the render
times were way too long.

The human models are from DAZ (http://www.daz3d.com/) with the textures from DAZ
and Renderosity. The girls' swimsuits were painted onto their skin texture
using Paint Shop Pro. As for the men, you can't really tell if they have
swimsuits on or not :-) Don't tell anyone or they'll be in hot water! (sorry,
couldn't resist)

More details and closeups are available at
http://www.fitzel.ca/dart/fireandice/fireandice.html

