EMAIL: mbasca@go.ro
NAME: Mihai Bisca
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Moon Gate
COUNTRY: Romania
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED: HF-Lab, POV-Ray, Gimp, Slackware Linux 
RENDER TIME: 2 hours 13 minutes
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 1.2GHz, 256Mb DDRAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Earth viewed from the moon, near a timeless stone
gate. They say the moon will be our gateway to the stars. But what if
someday we'll find out it has been visited by others before us ?

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:  
The moon is a height field made with HF-Lab. 

For the stones, which are isosurfaces, I wrote my own macro, based on 
a simple pigment function added to a sphere. 

The earth is just that, taken with Gimp from the famous NASA image of
the earthrise. It is so much more realistic than creating a layered
texture sphere, although the resolution is low. 

The stars are two kinds of tiny spheres, placed randomly on the sky.