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Surveyor |
Here's the information I would have sent to the competition...
EMAIL: ssloan@HiWAAY.net
NAME: Steve Sloan II
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Surveyor
HOMETOWN: Hartselle, Alabama, USA
WEBPAGE: http://home.HiWAAY.net/~ssloan/
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 for Windows
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.02, SPatch, Moray, hand-coding
RENDER TIME: A little over 53 minutes
HARDWARE USED: AMD K6-200 MHz with Win 95
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
My first autobiographical entry.
When I worked as a rodman on a surveying crew for three Alabama summers, I didn't have a very good time. The rodman is the guy who holds the prism rod at the place to be located. The other guy, with the "gun", then aims at the head of the prism rod to get the right azimuth and elevation angles, and fires a laser to get the distance. After a little math, this gives the exact 3-dimensional location of the prism head.
I also had to cut down any grass, branches, or small trees that obscured the "gun's" view of the head of the prism rod, using the bush axe.
I spent most of that time getting attacked by bugs, like the fly that bit underneath my eyelid. The entire area swelled up, until my eye was almost swollen shut. I had to get an antihistamine shot just to get rid of it!
The guy in the foreground is the rodman, and the orange-and-white striped object in his hand is the prism rod. The (often muddy) bush axe is in the guy's other hand. The guy with the "gun" is in the background, warning the poor rodman of the giant Alabama skeeter (mosquito) approaching!
As you can see, my idea of nature isn't very favorable! :-)
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I learned to use Moray about halfway through this project, so I hand-coded about half of the image. The rodman was created in sPatch, and the surveying equipment was positioned using Moray. The prism rod was hand-coded, as was the entire background, but the "gun" was built in Moray. Since the bezier patches in the rodman took so much parse time, I gave up on using a second sPatch-man to man the "gun", and built a simpler character with CSG objects in Moray.
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| Last modified: July 5, 1998 |
E-mail me: ssloan@HiWAAY.net |