EMAIL: mein@cs.umn.edu NAME: Kent Mein TOPIC: Science Fiction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: 3.0beta for SGI TOOLS USED: the gimp,xv, xpaint RENDER TIME: (render for imagemap 6m43s, render for finished product 17m26s) 24m9s HARDWARE USED: SGI INDY 133 MHZ (R4600) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Since I saw a comment somewhere that said most "good" raytracings are images that look "real" So I figured I'd try something that did not. You may have to adjust The gama in this image because I rendered it on an sgi and a linux machine, when viewing on a machine with lower display quality it looks dark. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Everything is pretty much straight forward. I did the ground (mars.inc) As a heightfield using crat_dat.pov to get my heightfield image. I got the idea from the pov3demo/other directory. I think it was easyer to use than doing something like terrain maker. However its a little more involved and not very intuitive. The earth (sky.inc) is just a textured sphere. I created the texture with the gimp (a paint program) Its not very fancy but I think it did the trick. The stars (also in sky.inc) are a while loop with 4 random numbers one for radius of the sphere and the other three are rotations to off set the stars. The sign (sign.inc) is just a couple of differences to remove the text objects from the solid sign. The Large gun off to the side (gun.inc) and Marvin himself (marvin.pov) are half blob objects and half csg with the basic primiatives. These two objects are probably the coolest part of the picture. Neat parts on the gun are the sign, which is an image map (acme.gif that I created with the gimp) Notice that its put once on a sphere as a plane. (So the rest of the sphere is invisable) The big blue sphere below it is part of a blob. I use one other image map on the gun that is the earth in the crosshairs (crosshair.gif) This is just a grab of a previous rendered earth and added in red lines to form the crosshairs. The neat bit about marvin is the hair. I choped up a torus, then put 5 of these hairs togeather to form a row, and then did a few row objects. one direction and then a few the other direction. The other hard bit is the red part of his body is all a big blob. You have to offset everything so you don't get large sphere shaped objects at joints like the knees or elbow's. At someplaces I even made them seperate blobs so that it still looked like the meshed togeather smoothly. It makes working with blobs alot easyer. The ship off to the left of the image is the biggest object, its mostly csg but I used the modeler ac3d to do the wing objects which are just an extruded polygon. I also tried doing the carrot decals with ac3d however the resulting files were too big for pov. So I resorted back to csg by hand. (carrot.inc) To rebuild everything you'll need to do a do_pov crat_dat.pov and then a do_pov marvin.pov, Or an equivelant.