EMAIL: jonestb@eng.auburn.edu
NAME: Ben Jones
TOPIC: Time
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.0 Beta 6 for Linux
TOOLS USED: none
RENDER TIME:   0 hours  8 minutes  48.0 seconds (528 seconds)
HARDWARE USED: Dx2/66 32megs RAM running Linux
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
   The Nexus from Star Trek: Generations approaching a planet.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
   I started out with the goal of using the new halo feature of POVRay combined
 with the new loop feature to make a whole bunch of halos that fit along a 
 slightly modified sine curve.  Well, the idea WORKED, but it looked awful and 
 absolutely nothing like the Nexus.  So I tried to make one big object out of
 a union of cylinders made with the same loop and then attach a halo to the 
 union, but that turned out even worse.  Finally, I discovered the simplest
 thing possible: Take a plane, apply a marble pigment with a pinkish color map
 and cut out one of the stripes with a clip.  PERFECT! (Well, at least for me.)
 Then, I wanted to make a decent looking planet so I would have something else
 in the scene, but the standard bozo pigmented planet just didn't look real 
 enough to me anymore.  I was sifting through the online docs when I happened
 upon the new texture_map feature and decided that it was the perfect idea 
 (since I could use the actual water texture for the watery parts), and so I
 made up a little land texture (which somehow turned out to have nice 
 coastlines) and used the water texture [which turned out to have appearances
 of different depths (nice work guys)].  Finally, there was the star that I
 decided to stick in there (still trying to use a halo somewhere), and started
 with just a halo, but I never could get anything decent out of it.  I ended
 up using a spotted pigment with an orange/yellow color map and then, yes, I
 put a halo around it.