EMAIL: roy@rcs.urz.tu-dresden.de
NAME: Roy Schulz
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: winpov 3.00e and povray 3.00b for Linux
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 4.1
RENDER TIME: 8 hours 35 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133, 32 MB


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The image shows a base on a planet somewhere in space, let's say on Mars or
so. The base is attacked by some fighters and defending laser turrets try
to protect it. I tend to call the picture "Mars Base Attack".

In the middle are two landing pads with a shuttle in the left one. The
shuttle was inspired by the ones in Star Wars while everything else in the
scene is my own creation. I'm especially proud of the realistic looking
fire and smoke from the crashing fighter in the front.

I made extensive use of the new halo feature in povray. This is the main
reason for the render time besides the anti aliasing and some area lights.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

With the movie "Independence Day" still in my mind I immediately thought of
an attack scene when I saw the topic "Science Fiction". I started with a
height field for some hills and developed the scene more and more whenever I
had a good idea. Finally this image turned out.

All explosions, the lasers and the smoke are halos. For the smoke I used
several spherical halos in a cylindrical container object. A problem was 
that intersecting halos in different container objects are not rendered 
correctly and inside one container object you can't use different color
maps. So in earlier versions of the image the ellipsoid containing the fire
was visible in the smoke. To decrease this problem as far as possible I made
the fire almost fitting its container object and put the smoke a little bit
above to conceal the edges of the ellipsoid.

The whole source code was written in winpov's integrated editor. Also the
very many test renderings were done in winpov because of it's comfort. For
the image maps and the JPEG conversion I used Paint Shop Pro.

The final image was rendered in povray for Linux since it is slightly faster 
and the computer is still usable because of the very good multitasking in
Linux. During the rendering I wrote this text file and used xv to look at
the image from time to time. So maybe the render time could be a little bit
shorter if you leave the comupter alone.

For the final image I used the following options: +a0.2 +am2 +r2 -j

I'd be grateful for suggestions, questions, criticism and (of course)
praise. I hope you enjoy the image. If yes, please vote for it :-)


                                       Roy Schulz (roy@rcs.urz.tu-dresden.de)