On March, 21st I went to the northern polar circle and took a snapshot of this scene, where some snowmen had built that beautiful palace in winter and didn't think about the sun rising again after a half year. They had built it just some kilometers too far in the south. I never saw one of them again... ;-)

It's fully created in Pov-Ray and it took me 1h for the concept, about 30h for the details and about 3 days of tears as I saw it melting...

Pentium II 450 render time: 6h

melting pieces

Some of the melting pieces like the fallen spire in the left I first modelled in POV in an extra scene, looking from above and giving it a y-gradient black-to-white to show the depth information (no lightsources, full ambient light). Then I blurred and smeared this picture a bit in a photo editor and used it as a heightfield in POV again. See "spitze2.tga" in the zip-archive below.

There is a snowman.inc file in the zip-archive below and you can use the contained macro as follows:

snowman (leftup, leftdir, rightup, rightdir, headup, headdir, mouthpos, mouthwidth, mouthround)

where leftup ist the up/down angle and leftdir the direction for the left arm, equally to the right and the head. Mouthpos is the mouth' position up or down in the face, mouthwidth the 'grinning'-angle to the left and right and mouthround for the lucky, sad or neutral look or anything between.

Made an animation with it? Let me know!

Sorry the files are not very well commented, sometimes in german, sometimes in english. But they work. Have a look on my homepage now and then, perhaps you will find a better commented file one day.

Source Code for POV: we_melt.zip (178k)