EMAIL: Tha.AMPro@pegasuz.com
NAME: Alex Mead     
TOPIC: Science Fiction 
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 2.2  (Hey, that's what was available to me)
TOOLS USED: PowerPOV for pov script generation
RENDER TIME: 25 minutes 7 seconds
HARDWARE USED: 486/66
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: an AMProBot 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

     Hmmm, where to begin.  Since PovRAY 2.2 has been all I've had at my
  disposal for eons, I've been writing a POV script generator for PowerBASIC
  called PowerPOV.  It makes it a lot easier to render thousands of 
  objects using PovRAY 2.2 (I know, I know, just in the nick of time eh?)
  But anyway that's all it took, one rougly 600 line PowerBASIC program
  and my PowerPOV library.  PowerPOV assembled the roughly 2500 lines of
  POV script and about 30 minutes later, there it was.

EXTRA STUFF THAT YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT TO KNOW

     I swore to myself that I wouldn't ever become a Web Browser.  I've 
  seen many a netscape addict on campus at 3am unable to go home, but
  considering that I needed to check out my web page, I was left with 
  little choice.  When I got to the part where I had to decide what links 
  to add to my page, I figured I'd just check out a few to see if I want to
  include them or not.  Anyway, as a 2 to 3 year veteran of PovRAY I figured
  I'd check out the page and add the link.  Well, see then there was this 
  Internet Ray Tracing competition thing, and the topic was--get this--
  science fiction.  Obviosly a sign that whoever runs this competition
  wanted me to enter something.  I mean I only Ray trace science fiction
  stuff every day of my life.
     Hi, my name's Alex Mead.  I make this magazine called the AMProGram
  which features comic book art that I write and illustrate, and is about
  characters from the video games I make, and well, you guessed it, the 
  backgrounds in my magazine are raytraced.  Yes this is all very time
  consuming so I didn't have a lot of time to write pov script files and
  that's why I wrote PowerPOV.  In case you're wondering, the mixture of
  my comic art and my pov backgrounds is pretty good and can be seen at
  http://www.pegasuz.com/ampro.
     Unfortunately the exact pov script I used to render this image was
  mistakenly deleted, but I've included most of the component files and
  that's basically all you really need to tinker around in my image.
     I would really love visitors to my web page, and especially EMail 
  from other ray-tracing fans, especially suggestions and comments.  I
  will be downloading Povray 3.0 as soon as I find a time when I don't get
  that "The PovRay FTP server is busy, do not disturb it little man."
  message and I would appreciate any tips and help on how it can make 
  my life easier.  I've read some of the docs that I could find on it, 
  a whole bunch of it makes a lot of PowerPOV obsolete.  Like rotating
  things through three dimentions (had to track down and talk to big
  time mathemetitions to get that stuff, and now it's all done for me, 
  erg (ah, but I digest)). 
     PS: I talk a lot when it's late in the morning and I havn't been
  to bed yet.  I bet you needed me to tell you that.

  This message has been brought to you by the letters "P", "V", the number
  "2", and the subliminal message "Please check out my web page http://www.
  pegasuz.com/ampro".