TITLE: Seth's Playground
NAME: James Moore
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: jtm11@bellsouth.net
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: seth.jpg
ZIPFILE: seth.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray, Gimp for jpg conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    around 24hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon MP 1.4GHz, 256MB Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

On the newly discovered world of Seth, named after the ancient Egyptian god of
the desert and chaos, a scattered group of large, living crystals, commonly
known as suncatchers, reflect the early morning sunlight as a dust storm
gathers strength in the distance.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

A simple image made entirely in povray mainly to see if I could actually do it
without using other tools.  The sand and mountains are heightfields with
leopard and wrinkle patterns.  The crystals are simple csg objects with a glass
texture and a slight emitting media for brightness and are there just to break
up the monotony of the sand.  The sky is a scattering media in front of a
skysphere backplane for brightness.  The sun is a sphere with emitting media. 
The clouds are made from a large sphere with a media density fading from 0 at
the center to a wrinkle pattern at the edges.  The dust is a box with a
scattering media.  It was originally supposed to be light dust blowing off the
ground, but I accidentally got the density pattern upside down.  After
rendering it, I decided I liked the way it made the horizon darker, so I left
it that way.  I'm not quite happy with the way the mountains turned out, but
converting them to isosurfaces made the render times even longer.  I know
render time for all the media objects really adds up, but I really like the
feel I think they add to the image.

As always, any comments or advice is greatly appreciated.