EMAIL:         shipbrk@gate.net
NAME:          Jeff Lee
TOPIC:         Imaginary Worlds
TITLE:         Eminiar VII
COUNTRY:       USA
WEBPAGE:       http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/raytrace/
COPYRIGHT:     I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
HARDWARE USED: AMD K62-350
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.01 (OS/2 compile)
RENDER TIME:   37 minutes, 39 seconds (at +A0.001)
TOOLS USED:    OS/2 System Editor, LView Pro 1.B2/16

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

   A raytraced re-creation of the matte painting used to depict the
   planets Eminiar VII and Scalos in the original _Star Trek_ series
   (in episodes "A Taste of Armaggedon" and "Wink of an Eye").

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

   The actual objects are, for the most part, extremely simple
   primitives (boxes, cylinders, cones, a few prisms, et cetera) to
   which layered textures have been applied to make them appear more
   complex.

   Each object was created individually (working from a photo of the
   original matte painting on pp. 24-25 of "The Art of Star Trek") and
   tweaked by itself, before scaling and placing it into the main scene
   file using the highly scientific method of trial and error.

   Some objects were distorted slightly with the "matrix" keyword in
   order to make their angles more closely resemble their painted
   counterparts.  All objects were created "by hand" in the OS/2
   equivalent of Windows Notepad.

   One "cheat" that I had to use was caused by the fact that I could not
   get the shadow of the crosspiece on the central wedge-shaped building
   to resemble the one in the painting, without throwing the rest of the
   shadows off.  To overcome this difficulty, I applied the "no_shadow"
   keyword to the crosspiece, then faked a shadow with a thin,
   semitransparent prism which had the same profile as the crosspiece,
   with a matrix applied to make it slant downwards.

   I attempted to use area lights to soften the shadows in the
   background, but any suitable values interfered too much with the
   shadows in the foreground, which (in the original painting) were
   very crisp and sharp, so I returned to using point lights.

   I included an experimental feature: a clear mesh in front of the
   camera, with an extremely small bozo pattern of transparent brown
   to simulate a subtle film grain.

   A reference image of the matte painting (in use, with actors and
   partial set inserted) is included in the .zip archive, and is also
   at <http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/raytrace/graphics/ref-emin.jpg>
   for your convenience.  (Be aware, though, that the colours are
   somewhat browner in the reference shot than in the reproduction of
   the actual painting, which was what I actually worked from.
   Unfortunately, the larger version wouldn't fit onto my scanner.)

   The image was converted to JPEG using LView Pro, with a quality
   setting of 85%.