EMAIL: dapigg2000@yahoo.com
NAME: Mark "ScottishPig" Burger
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: ENDURANCE
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://68.33.135.171:3065/
RENDERER USED: Blender-Creator 2.23
TOOLS USED: Gimp & MS PAINT
RENDER TIME: 43 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 333MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I rencently saw the TV movie 'Shackleton' starring Kenneth Brannagh
and it inspired me to make a ship in his predicament. I decided to
make a ship- due to the short amount of time, it's not ENTIRELY 
accurate, however, it gives a good indication. I put the icefield
and snow in after modelling the ship.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

To create the ship, I used alot of mesh objects. To model the hull,
I made a rib by stretching out part of a circle & extruding it
countless times and sizing it in various 1-dimensional increments from
there. The sails were done by stretching a plane, subdividing and 
pulling it (magnet tool, of course) in the direction of the wind
was blowing. I applied a simple bumpmap and viola! For the ice,
I made a giant plane and did a randomised subdivide (subdivide fractal)
and partially submerged it beneath the water. I applied an envmap
to simulate reflections. The snow was a more recent application.
To do this, I made 2 giant planes and subdivided them. I applied
a particle system to each of the 2 planes & modelled a simple
hexagonal snowflake to parent to both of them. After parenting,
I turned on DUPLIVERTS to the particle system... It's complicated
in explaination, yet provides a beautiful effect.

When making the snow, I was faced with a small dilemma, the snow
looked like stars, I fixed this by turning on blender's 'MBlur' 
feature & tweaked with the settings. MBlur is why the rendertime
is so high- otherwise it would be under a minute. Most of the
textures are proceedural. The sail texture was made in MS Paint
by drawing simple lines straight up and down. The bumpmap is procedural.

On my site, you can follow the timeline of this render...
http://68.33.135.171:3065/JPEGs and look for the files called
ENDURANCE-preview with a number after it. I had 14 preview renders
and 2 release candidates. the release candidates are only slight
additions. RC2 just has more detail to the handrail on the poop deck.
As you can see- I have come a long long way since the initial render.

I don't think this work as being very complicated, I can only wish it
luck and hope that my work has paid off.