EMAIL:  casteeld@cococo.net
NAME:   Don Casteel
TOPIC:  Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT:      I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
RENDERER USED: Polyray v1.8
TOOLS USED:     Gforge, Autocad r10 & r13, 3ds2pov.
HARDWARE USED:  486-66 Win3.11, Pentium-100 Windows NT

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Title  "Curiosity".  This image represents the human mind exploring the 
universe with a child like innocence.

Although this image doesn't have space ships ect. I feel it falls under the
topic
of science fiction. Alien landscape, intelligent life, and the mysteries of the

universe are, to me what good science fiction is made of.

The sunset sky is a procedural texture, I layered a gradient base texture under
a
noise based texture where the color of the clouds is also a gradient, inverse
of
the base texture.

The mountains were file based height fields created by gforge. I created two
files
using the same random number seed, but different noise values. The lower noise
value field was rendered as a smooth height field, where the higher noise value
field was not smoothed for rendering. I adjusted vertical scaling, and position
until I was happy with the effect of the peaks jutting up from the general
landscape.

I then tiled the height fields in a 3 x 3 matrix to create enough land area to
work with.

Both height fields were texture mapped with tileable textures I had previously
created
using gforge and polyray. (I created these textures for web page backgrounds,
available 
at my web site: http://www.cococo.net/business/casteeld/index.htm)

The ribbon for the large ball "entity" was drawn in autocad, exported out in 3ds
format, 
then converted to raw format using 3ds2pov.exe.

The ribbon texture is a spherical gradient changing from reflective gold to
bumpy 
transparent magenta, as you move to the center of the sphere.

The reflective gold ball in the center was added to reduce the "busyness" the
ribbon has by itself.

The smaller object being "looked at" by the large entity is a simple CSG. with
satin blue, and bumpy orange textures.

Much time was spent with the positions of the objects and camera (lots of trial
and error)
until I was happy with the results.

I hope you enjoy looking at this image as much as I enjoyed creating it!