EMAIL: lpurple@netcom.com NAME: Lance Purple TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Callisto COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: Povray for Windows v3.1 TOOLS USED: PaintShop Pro (for JPG conversion) RENDER TIME: 11 h 20 m HARDWARE USED: 486DX66 PC with Windows 95 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An alien noblewoman relaxes at a resort, on the shore of Lake Krovobar on the planet Callisto. Unlike our Callisto, this imaginary world has a terrestrial climate and is well outside of Jupiter's radiation belts. About 100 km to the northwest is the capitol city of Serenis (shown in a Frank R. Paul painting on the cover of _Amazing Stories_, Nov. 1941). painting DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I've always liked that particular painting, and wanted to do something like it for this contest topic. So: A) went out on the Web and found a good face mesh on a grad student's page in Australia. (See the source file for author credits and URL) Converted it to POV format, and tweaked the facial expression. B) Using Peck's _Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist_, modelled the woman's head, torso, legs, and hands out of primitives. Wrote nice macro for the hand that uses a simple finger-clench angle. C) Modelled the piers, and the arched bridge out of prisms, spending nearly a week on elements that barely show up the final scene. D) Wrote a triangle-mesh tentacle macro for the arms, based on article "Calculation of Reference Frames Along a Space Curve" in Glassner's _Graphics Gems_ book. E) Threw together the lizard models in a single weekend, then spent the rest of week 5 on the dress, jewelry, and hair some more. G) Got to work on the water and the vegetation macros. Added faked caustic textures for the pier and bridge. H) Got a jupiter texture map from NASA JPL website, modelled a simple jupiter plus moons scene for a backdrop texture. I) Ooops. Only a week left. Couldn't get the hair right, so added a straw hat. Abandoned work on the fancy villas, and put in more krove-trees to fill the background. J) Final rendering has grass leaves sticking through the tree roots, because I changed the nBlades param. Dammit! Oh well, no time to re-render it at T Minus 15 hours; hope the judges are impressed enough by the other elements of the scene to overlook it... .----------------------------. | lpurple at netcom dot com | '----------------------------'