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.