EMAIL: steve@g7mrp.demon.co.uk
NAME: Steve Attwood
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 2.2
TOOLS USED: 3D2POV 1.8, Paint Shop Pro 3.12, Cyber Sculpt 1.1, Display 1.87b 
RENDER TIME: Approx 8 hours
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 60MHz 8Mb RAM, Atari 520STFM 4Mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Title: 'Ice Tomb' - A pilot meets his death in the inky 
                   depths of space when the ion engines of his fighter fail. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The spacecraft was modelled using the Cyber Sculpt package on the Atari
ST. The model was split into three files by saving different objects in
each of the files. This is due to if the single file was exported by the 
3D2POV conversion program, the resultant .INC file is 4.6Mb in size (!) and 
is too big to edit by the Write text editor.

As all the objects in the model are in the same place, just different parts 
removed in the three files, when the image is rendered (including the three
.INC files in the main .POV file) the image looks complete.

Textures were then created using a variety of paint packages, which are 
tileable and code (image maps) was added to the .POV file generated by the 
3D2POV program to apply the textures to the surface of the spacecraft. A grey 
scale 'tile' was also applied (as a bump map) which is just a number of 
overlapping grey blocks to give the impression of irregular surfaces and 
bolt-on panels.

A sphere was added for the background, and using a .GIF file for stars, and 
a number of layered textures (agate pigment) were used which have transparency 
as part of the colour maps, so the background has the effect of plasma and gas 
clouds, as seen in 'Babylon 5'.  

The image was finally rendered, requiring a 29Mb swap file and approx 8 hours 
to raytrace with anti-alaising set to 0.3. A point to note is that the image
took over an hour to pre-process due to the heavy usage of virtual memory, and
the mapping of the tilable textures to the spaceship!

A copyright message was added using Paint Shop Pro, and the image was converted
to JPEG format using Display 1.87b with the quality set to 97%.

Steve-----> 
19th October 1996
This is image can also be seen among others at my WWW Gallery:-  
http://www.g7mrp.demon.co.uk/dwsteve.html