EMAIL: murtaza001@hotmail.com
NAME: Murtaza Amin
TOPIC: Journey
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Interplanetary Journey
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: Polyray 1.8
TOOLS USED: paint (for drawing spherical height map picture), Irfanview (for modifying spherical height map picture)
CREATION TIME: ~8 hours computer time (Most of the time on frames containing the asteroid, rest was much quicker).
HARDWARE USED: Split the work between AMD 1.2GHz laptop and AMD 1.533GHz desktop
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
As is.  I am a little disappointed with the .mpg conversion, but I can't complain since everyone is subject to it.
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
A journey from a mining operation to home.  The spaceship kind of reminds me of my car:  Red, not the best paint job, but runs like a champ.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

I made extensive use of noise functions for the textures.  These are all available in the attached .zip file.  Note that the height map file "untitled.jpg" I used for my asteroid was originally a .bmp.  I'm not sure if polyray accepts .jpg's, so you probably have to convert it back to .bmp.  I don't know how the conversion will affect the surface, but it will probably introduce unwanted artifacts.  These can be smoothed away hopefully.

Spaceship:
Beziers and stretched spheres.  The burn marks are from a scaled noise function.

Starfield:
Large "sky sphere" around the whole scene.  The texture of the sphere is a sum of a few noise functions on various scales.

Ringed Planet:
Recycled from an earlier submission of mine.  The ring and surface textures are scaled noise functions.

Earthlike Planet:
Sphere with (you guessed it) some noise functions.

Asteroid:
Spherical height map from the file "untitled.bmp".  The file was too big to include in my source, so I included a .jpg of it.  You'll have to convert it back to a .bmp to use it.

All textures and objects were created by me.