The Virtual Kite Festival

Snowflake Kite sketch
The best zoos show their animals in as near as possible to their natural habitat. So I decided to take some of the specimens from the Virtual Kite Zoo and fly them in the big wide cybersky.

If you'd like to fly some of these kites yourself, or colour them to your own fancy, or even build a few of your own, you can! You'll just need to spend a couple of hours learning how.

First of all, you have to download Pov-Ray version 3.1 - free from the Pov-Ray site. It comes with an excellent tutorial and reference manual - it's big, but don't be put off - you'll be doing interesting things after only a few pages, and hardly need to know any more before you can start colouring or flying my kites.

Then, download my kites. Right-click to download this zip-file, and unpack it to a convenient folder on your hard disk. It contains a readme file which tells you what you've got.

If you create your own festival, or make any new kites of your own, do let me know. (But please don't mail me large picture files without warning!)

Wallpaper

If you want to use the Festival as your Windows wallpaper, right-click on one of these links to download it at resolutions of 640x480 (44k), 800x600 (72k) or 1024x768 (104k). Use Paintshop Pro or some other graphic package to convert it to .bmp format. (You didn't want to download a huge .bmp file, did you?) If you run your screen in 256 colour mode you'll also need to decrease the colour depth.

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