Snow Sculpting in Breckenridge, Colorado
Snow Main
Day Zero
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
January 16-20, 2001, at the 11th annual Breckenridge International Snow Sculpture Championship, Stan Wagon (Team Captain), Robert Longhurst (Artist), John Bruning, and Dan Schwalbe will be sculpting a snow version of an original design of Robert Longhurst. The title of the snow sculpture is White Narcissus.

Stan Wagon showed Matthias Weber photographs of this sculpture in October 2000, and asked him whether he could come up with a parameterization of this surface.

The sculpture looked quite complicated; from a single photograph it is even hard to say how many boundary curves there are. Also, it seemed as if there were two straight lines on the surface, a very useful thing when one is looking for a parameterization of a minimal surface. You can find the somewhat surprising results of Matthias's investigations here.


Narcissus
To the right, a preview of the snow scuplture, created using Bryce 4 and a VRML model exported from Mathematica, a program by Wolfram Research, our sponsors. More raytraced images are here.
Raytraced snow sculpture