EMAIL: rthomas@HiWAAY.net
NAME: Robert Thomas
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.0
TOOLS USED: Micrografx Photo Magic (format conversion)
RENDER TIME: 4h 05m 56s
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-120
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

"See the World From a Whole New Perspective:  Affordable Luxury in Orbit!"

That's what the ad said.  Yeah, the view is nice, but if only you'd known.

So you're just sitting down at your genuine woodtone plastic table, about to 
have a yummy glass of nutrient fortified orange flavored juicelike beverage 
product, when you feel an all-too-familiar lurch as all your internal organs 
suddenly shift slightly.  Gravity's off.  Again.  Third time this month, but 
you suppose it could be worse.  Could be hull breaches.

This image comes right from the depths of my twisted soul.  It isn't based in
any previously existing fictional universe.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I created it all in the builtin editor, because I haven't found a modeller I
like.  I've seen some pretty nice results from POVLab, but haven't been able
to give it a try myself.

The planet is a set of three concentric spheres.  The atmosphere is a halo.
The clouds are a bozo with a transparent color map.  The planet itself is a
bozo between highly reflective water and relatively flat (finish) land.  The
land itself is a tan and green bozo, with normal bumps on it.

The visible station exterior is mostly one big CSG, as is the little remote
probe that shines spotlights on the station.  The remote is actually an
externally defined object, and is fairly detailed on its own, though much
of the detail is lost at the small scale.  On the main hull, the light gray
tiles are somewhat more reflective than the dark gray tiles.  This is an
effect I have seen used effectively in other images of space structures,
and I wanted to see how it would work here, though the viewing angle doesn't
show it much.

The room in which the viewer is floating is a box carved out of a plane, with
a light source in the middle of the ceiling to simulate a realistic interior
light.

The window glass was a problem.  There are supposed to be two panes, but the
interreflections between the panes made the exterior view almost invisible,
so I removed the thick outer one, but kind of hinted at its existence by
putting a "drilled hole" with a bolt through it in the bottom right corner
of the nonexistent window.

Other than that, the stars are a small-scale bozo.  The glass and handrail
are CSGs (with a quilting pattern on the rail), and the blobs of juice are,
well, blobs.