EMAIL: cfusner@enter.net
NAME: Charles Fusner
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.0
TOOLS USED: MS-DOS Edit, mostly. Plus a little Paint Shop Pro for the
            image_maps and bump maps. And of course HF-LAB for the ground.
            (NO modeller this time around).
RENDER TIME: Approx. 40 some odd hours. ** (see below, though)
HARDWARE USED: 386/387 for construction and some rendering, 486DX-66 for the
               remainder of the rendering ** (see below)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Sitting lonely vigil upon the hills of southern Helionus,
  Martigan Dhantaki chanced to look down amidst the autumn leaves and saw a
  curious artifact which looked like nothing that his world had ever seen 
  before..."
        This image depicts what he saw, showing the artifact's slightly
  battered looking alien strangeness juxtaposed with the familiar sight of
  autumn leaves (so familiar to this time of year here in my little corner
  of the Earth).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The origin of this picture was in
  a quick illustration I made for my roleplayers' club's current storyline.
  The initial version of this object was extremely rough, having been hashed
  out in just four hours, and looking like nothing more "alien" than a common
  calculator.
        First I used HF-LAB to construct a simple bit of fractally jagged
  landscape on which the object was to rest, and did several test renders 
  until the object looked like it was sitting on the resultant height_field
  without sinking into it :> Later I gave the landscape h_f a kind of "salt-
  and-pepper granite" texture.
        Next, I aligned the object with an orthographic camera and set the
  up & right vectors so that it completely filled the screen. This produce the
  basic source for an image map, to whose buttons I added the alien alphabet
  in PSP. Then, taking it back to the original image, I union'ed all the keys
  and applied that image map to the union as a whole, managing to put the
  writing on all keys at once. It was also more or less at this point that I 
  decided to throw a touch of iridescence into the artifact's display panel.
        The hardest part was the leaves. I went through five failed attempts
  to make a halfway realistic leaf before finally falling back on bicubic
  patches as an old reliable standby. The final leaves consist of five bezier
  patches, initally fashioned flat so that once again an orthographic camera
  could produce a silhouette image as a source for the bump_map of the veins
  which were then added to the source in PSP once more, and then bump_mapped
  onto the leaf surface. Once the bump map was in place, I just hand tweaked 
  the edges of the patches up to give it some natural curling. I'm still not 
  100% happy with them, but since they ate up a week and a half of test 
  renders, I had to stop being a perfectionist or miss the IRTC deadline!
        I started to render this whole thing on a 386-16, but since my final
  piece involved antialiasing and an area light, I had to borrow the use of
  a 486DX66 to finish in time for the competition.