Title: Snow Walk
Name: Zach Best
Brickshelf Gallery: Ravious

About this entry:
It was pretty fun, and I got to teach myself a few more POV tricks (like loops mainly).

Nothing was changed in the MPD and I used L3PAO to convert to POVRAY and then I used Mesh-Enhancer on the minifig's hair to smooth it out. No colors were changed either.

The first thing I worked on was the lighting. I had pictured some moonbeams filtering through the trees, but I couldn't get that to work while maintaining a good overall picture. It was either darkness and moonbeams or what you see now. I think I made pretty good used of the media (it is not atmospheric, it is bounded to save time and memory). The torch light is a point light with a high decay. Those are the only two lights.

Then I tweaked the Finish of the materials. The minifig has a higher ambient than the rest of the scene, except for the ground snow which has a very high ambient to give it that glowy effect.

Next up are the snowflakes. They are lego round 1x1 plates scaled down in size and then randomly oriented and randomly placed. I think I set up the loops so that in the scene there are 3,600 of the "snowflakes."

I used the makesnow.inc that is pretty popular around the POVRAY community for snow. It worked really well on the big trees, and not so well on the small trees. Supposedly, the more complex the object the better the snow sticks. So an object that is mostly geometric, like the small trees, will not catch as much snow.

Finally for post-processing, I blurred out a one-pixel line on the minifig's hair (an artifact from Mesh-Enhancer) and then put a 50% duplicate screen overlay to make the brights a little brighter.

If I had the will to work on this more I would try and work on the lighting a bit more, but I am happy how it turned out.