EMAIL: stratbue@in.tum.de

NAME: Sebastian "Chano" Stratbücker

TOPIC: Landscapes

TITLE: Beacon

COUNTRY: Germany

WEBPAGE: www.chano.de

RENDERER USED: povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: none

RENDER TIME: 20h 46 min

HARDWARE USED: Pentium III at 0.6 GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A red-glowing beacon, sticking in the dusty surface of a moon that
surrounds an earth-like planet.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Since I had no possibilities to create realistic plants or other
natural shapes, using only the POV-Raytracer, I decided to build
a rather lifeless environment. So I remembered the photographs of
the rising earth, that were shot by astronauts on the moon :
bright shining moon dust, hard shadows thrown by rocks and the blue
tiny planet on the horizon.
The moon was made quickly out of an iso-sphere, and also the
randomly placed rocks were soon looking quite realistic. But after
the first test renders, I recognized a nasty problem. The dark side
of the rocks (because I only used one light source : the sun) looked
extremely flat and I couldn't manage it to use radiosity with good
results taking render-time that ranged within a week.
The solution of this problem came with the POV-Ray logo, which I had
planned to put in my scene anyway. So I applied a glass material on it,
and placed a red glow in the center of the sphere. Now I had my flat
spots disappearing and by the way I could use the photons feature for
the glass logo.
Even if my scene doesn't exactly fit the "landscape topic", I think it
shows an important aspect of nature : the huge contrast between
any living planet and the remaining dead matter in this universe.
So I look at the pov logo as a beacon that leads you to a stand point
far away from human activity, where you can consider things from a certain
distance.

Technical remarks

-the star texture is taken from "stars.inc" and applied on a hollow sphere
-moon,rocks, planet and clouds are isosurface objects, functions are taken from "functions.inc"
-the relief of the moon surface is a combination of various functions, describing
an isosurface object like this : f_sphere - f_agate * f_noise3d
-similarly the rocks are formed : f_sphere - f_hetero_mf- f_agate * f_noise3d
(for further details see the povray source file "beacon.pov")
-the planet is a union of various spheres
-the relief of the land is done by an isosurface
-the sea is just a blue sphere, with little dents in the normal
-the thin clouds are provided by a texture from "skies.inc"
-the fat clouds are a CSG difference of an isosurface similar to the functions shown above,
and a sphere, that is bigger than the "sea sphere" to make them hover in the atmosphere.
-the atmosphere itself is a hollow sphere having media inside with blue scattering
-the beacon is originally ment to be the official POV-Ray logo. I only changed
the sphere into a hollow one, and put a light source in it. The caustic light effects
are provided by a photon map, which is saved in the "beacon.ph" file.