EMAIL:ewarma1@gl.umbc.edu
NAME:Eric Warman
TOPIC:Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray v3
TOOLS USED: text editor
RENDER TIME: 6 h 53 m 12 s
HARDWARE USED: 486DX-50
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A mercinary company raids a colonial outpost. The
mercinaries are in greater number and better armed than the local colonial
forces. The image is taken at a point in the battle when a colonial fighter
destroys a mercinary fighter. Unfortunetly another fighter has the colonial
ship in his sights and opens fire. In the background the undefended outpost
gets pounded by three merc fighters.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The Mercinary Fighters-
        This image started as a simple design I had for a Starfighter. Since
the design was very angular I decided that the best way to build it was to use
polygons. As opposed to using cubes or fooling with subtractions polygons take
absolute co-ordinates for their edges. I built the generic fighter and liked
it. It was still missing something however. Not being satisfied with how
texture maps look I used polygons to make the finer details on the ship. For
instance the hazard panels, the alternating yellow and black, were constructed
using polygons. With the main body layed out I set to work at the weapons. I
took a modular approach. I built a weapon outset from the hull by an arm. I
defined it as an object and simply used the same object to create three weapon
arms for the finished ship. The finishing touch on the ship was the plasma
beam. I wanted to avoid the normal blue/cyan or even red lasers/beam weapons.
So after A LOT of experimenting, I settled on a light purple. I used the halo
effect new to POV3 which is awesome. I highly recomend playing with this new
feature.

The Colonial fighter -
        This ship was a variation of other ships I have designed. It doesn't
have the level of detail the merc ship does but there is only one in the scene
and it's far enough away that you can't really tell. This ship is likewise
constructed of polygons. The major exception is the weapons. The laser style
weapons were made using the lathe feature. The beams themselves are cylinders
that again employ the halo effect.

The Colonial Outpost -
        This is a model I made for an animation. It is predominatly constructed
using lathe objects. There is lots of detail on the docking arms in the middle
of the station. The docking arms were constructed using cubes and numerous
subtractives.

The Planet -
        The planet has two spheres. The main sphere is the planet itself. I
used the granite modifier with an extensive color map. The second sphere was
slighty larger than the first and was textured with the Clouds texture.

The final scene -
        All the models were defined as objects. It took a while to find a good
arrangement but I finally settled on one. Once the objects were positioned I
adjusted the lengths of the individual beam weapons and added exposions at the
locations were colisions occured. The finishing touch was adding a starfield to
the background and set up the final render.