EMAIL: c9607692@engmail.newcastle.edu.au
NAME: Brendan Gregg
TOPIC: Science Fiction (Sep-Oct)
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.0 beta
TOOLS USED: Terrain Maker
RENDER TIME: Final render- 22 minutes
HARDWARE USED: The scene was created on a 486DX4/100, and the final render
         was drawn on "odysseus.newcastle.edu.au" Newcastle University's
         Engineering department's machine (hence only 22 mins to draw!)
IGAME DESCRIPTION: The picture is a Planet Scape with sand, water, and an
          Astranout standing alone...
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
        Last week I saw the topic for the internet competition was Science
Fiction- so I was keen to try drawing something but only had 7 days left to
start. 
        I started using Terrain Maker to make a height field for the scape.
Then I spent a few days adding textures to it- They are all original textures
and took me many days of guessing and reading the manual to get this 
final result. (The send was originally pink! And it looked awful- So I 
tried Green and Yellow and Black and by then I was sick of getting nowehere 
so I just started to guess..) 
        All the scene was put together using a text editor. So the text 
source included was hand written- no 3d moddeling studios were used as I 
find them time consuming and inaccurate.. 
        The Moon in the scene is just a sphere with my Moon texture on. 
WIth a bit of turbulence you can create any pattern!..
        If you have ever used height fields- you will have noticed how 
chunky they get as they get closer to the camera. It took another two 
days just to smooth the coast ling from a jagged zig zag to the smooth 
transition created with a lathe object (and by gussing the points!).
        The stars are created with a luminous sky globe with a bozo 
random pattern with small white highlights.
        Then the Astranout was created. He/She is divided up into two 
feet, two legs, a torse, two arms, a head and a backpack- as it was easy 
to render these small parts sepratly and make adjustments and then when 
they are completed to put them all together in one object. (Though I 
didn't have time to check whether they fitted right- and I think I got 
the legs y scale too high...) The wrinkled pattens in the space suit are 
created with texture maps and random pigment maps. Again- all these were 
created through the text interface by typing in numbers for the 
turbulence modifyers and pigment details.
        The actual body is made up from primitive shapes- mostly boxes, 
spheres, cylinders with a couple lathe, super ellipsoid and torus objects 
thrown in. No part of the astranout is a mesh object- it is all shapes. 
Also, no image maps are used anywhere in this scene, all the textures 
have been discribed mathematically..
        And then (after not having slept in 2 days. Creating a 
masterpiece in 7 days, whilst going to Uni, was harder than I thought!) 
I ran out of time. Before I could put any space craft or aliens or 
atmospherics or halos in the scene... But it looks good as is, in fact I 
think just the scape was better as it seemed more open- less cluttered.. 
But the astranout had to be in there somewhere.
        And today (Oct 31st) I went to uni and rendered the final draft 
on the very fast computers here- Wow! what a difference in speed it was! 
Then I used a paint bench to sign my name on the bottom and convert it to 
a JPG less than 250K.. (Theres a thought- did they want us to sign our 
images or what?)
        And thats all it took- 7 days from 1 hour to 12 :Q hours a day, and a 
little experience with Povray 2.0. And whats more it was fun to do!
Enjoy,
        Brendan Gregg 42!