TITLE: Man & Machine Meet the Supersonic Age
NAME: Dave Hamilton
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: olm@sprynet.com
WEBPAGE: www.traces.org
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: x1mach1.jpg
ZIPFILE: x1mach1.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray v3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, DeLuxe Paint, PhotoShop

RENDER TIME: 
    24 hours 43 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    PC/Pentium 200mHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

On a cloudless October morning in 1947, high above the Mojave Desert,
USAF Captain Charles "Chuck" Yeager, and the experimental Bell X-1
rocket plane, met the sound barrier for the first time. The image
depicts the point in the flight were the barrier shockwaves are
just beginning to form at the nose of the aircraft.

The model did not seem complete without a pilot, so he's in there.
He is just barely visible under the canopy, but any resemblance to
Chuck Yeager is purely coincidental.

Although not apparent in this scene, the model sports movable
ailerons, flaps and rudder. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The entire aircraft, including the canopy framing and pitot tubes,
is composed of Bezier patch objects generated using Mike Clifton's
sPatch. The basic patch objects were exported to POV-Ray for CSG
and rendering.

The rocket exhaust and shockwaves were created with POV primitives
using media. The background is a sky sphere with a 'y' gradient and 
an appropriate color map. The image caption and copyright notice are
POV text objects.

All image map graphics are my own original artwork created using
Electronic Arts DeLuxe Paint and Adobe PhotoShop.

The .pov file is extensively annotated for those interested in
further details on the scene's construction.

Other than graphic format conversion from POV-Ray .tga output to
.jpg, there was no post-processing of the image.