Project:	To Make a skijump
Name:	Brian Magill

First off I would like to credit the site that I used as a reference for the layout of the project:
POV-Ray Tutorials

I made this picture by first creating a number of simple rectangular cubes. The larger cube represents the tower of the ski jump. The narrower one is the straight section of the ramp. The ramp proved to be the most time consuming part of the project. I spent many hours and had numerous failed attempts at creating a ramp that met with the top of the tower in a manner that appeared somewhat correct. Initially, I started out with a number of cubes stacked together. Then, I tried to create a slope with the rotation function, however, I failed to realize that the rotation was fixed at the origin. Once I discovered this, I managed to get a reasonable looking slope, but found that I was unable to create the curve at the bottom of the slope using this method. So I went back to square one and started over with a different approach. I determined that it would be far simpler to construct the ramp with a rotated 3-dimensional rectangle. This approach, while it proved to be more feasible, proved quite challenging as well. I encountered a major hangup trying to calculate the location of the top left corner of the rotated rectangle. This was partially problematic because at first I was calculating an incorrect reference point on the rotated rectangle. Even after I realised this, it still took a few tries to find the necessary offset for the translation.

The next hangup came when I tried to place a curve at the bottom of the ramp. At first I tried to use the difference function of povray with a square and a cylinder. After a half dozen or so failures I abandoned that path and decided to use the difference function to hallow out a cylinder by placing another slightly smaller one inside of it. On the plus side It took a lot less time to determine the appropriate offset for the cylinder's location, as I still had the calculations from the previous translation. However, it still proved to be irritatingly difficult to determine how to crop the hallowed out cylinder. Initially I tried just using the ramp object that I had declared to remove the unwanted portions of the cylinder. This was somewhat ineffective, as the ramp was too narrow to remove the entire upper section of the cylinder. In the end I opted for a rotated square to remove most of the cylinder.