Title: The Rescue
Name: Arno van der Heijden

This is my contribution to the raytracing contest. Rendering was done with MegaPov and took more than 5(!) days on a Pentium 4 pc. The reasons for this are the use of high quality radiosity (with normals) and focal blur. No post-processing was used.

• First, the mesh-enhancer was used to smooth the minfig's hair. The original minfig was mirrored and two additional minfigs were added.
• The globe and the wooden stand were made out of simple Povray CSG-items. The wood texture is what I probably spent the most time on. It was adapted from the standard Povray texture library, but took a lot of time to get exactly right. Originally, I had put water inside the globe, but I forgot to turn it on for the final render :-).
• No lights are used, except for a small pointlight in the minfig's torch. All light comes from HDRI lighting. Thereto, the 'kitchen' lightprobe from Paul Debevec's site was used: http://www.debevec.org/Probes/
• The teapot and the mug were taken directly from Jaime Vives Piqueres' site: http://www.ignorancia.org/
• The snow on the trees is created with the help of Gilles Tran's makesnow macro. The falling snowflakes were done with a piece of code which I took from the Povray forum and tailored to suit my needs. The snow on the 'ground' is made out of an isosurface, which I took from somewhere as well.
• For the fabric pattern of the tablecloth, a bump map was used.
• Instead of anti-aliasing, I made use of focal blur. This was especially needed to soften the look of the tablecloth normals in the background.

Overall, I really learned a lot from this. Considering I'm really only a beginner with Povray, I'm very happy with the outcome. Bits and pieces were taken from everywhere and especially Jaime Vives Piqueres' site was very useful and inspiring. I you want to get more out of Povray, you should really check it out. Also, the official Povray forum is worth a visit.

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