Merry Christmas!

(or other appropriate seasonal holiday)

In the interest of spreading some wintertime cheer, I've gone back to one of the items on the original todo list sitting in the project directory -- Christmas Carolers! The minifigs in the Carolers still need a little something to make it apparent that they are singing. I debated over replacing the normal smiling faces with mouths that looked like they were singing, but in the end I decided against such LEGO blasphemy.

Jer has sent me the Ice Planet face image maps and some other goodies, so I may update this image when I get some more free time. I like the winter scene so much I'm thinking of using it as the setting for a few more images.

It took a long time to get the tree to look right. I experimented with indoor style lights for a while, until I realized that it would never look right without lens flair to make the lights "twinkle", which POV-Ray can't do. I created realistic looking outdoor bulbs with relative ease. Here I was experimenting with snow at the end of the day and ended up generating this image specifically to be a backdrop on my workstation. The lights on this tree are actually lights in the raytraced image, for a total of over 100 different light sources. Someone saw the backdrop and liked it, so I made a floppy for her with the .BMP on it. As a desktop image, it seems to be spreading like a virus...

I was planning to leverage this idea for a submission in the December 1995 Internet Raytracing Competition with the topic "Lights and Lighting," but it seems to have been cancelled. Problems (primarily with brightness) in the final scene (above) have led me to go with lights that just ~~look~~ like they're on.