EMAIL: pegzel@hooked.net NAME: Sam D Zilboorg TOPIC: Science Fiction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: LightWave 3D 5.0 TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop and Kai's Power Tools for image maps RENDER TIME: 1h 22m 34s HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium 166 16m IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image represents a small squad of ships haveing just arived through a Babylon 5(tm) style jumpgate and beginning an attack run. Meeting heavy resistance. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The model of the gate and vortex were downloaded from ftp.newtek.com and then coppied as somewhat of a tutorial/personal trainer. The ships were modeled useing Lightwave's B-Spline MetaNurb(tm) feature. Once the ships were built I began to piece the scene together, the ship model was loaded once, cloaned, and moved to there final positions. The destroyed ship is the same model just torn apart and rotated into an interesting position. The explosion its self its a collection of 2000 single-point polygons with a heavy glow and luminosity. Lighting this scene was very tricky, I used a total of 18 lights to get the desired effect. 1 distant light with a pure white color used to simulate the ambience of a sun without casting any shadows. A much duller, blue spotlight was used to cast the major shadows of the scene and give a nice edge to all objects. Next the smaller lights were added and parented to null objects in straight paths to get the look of heavy weapons fire. All of the weapons lights were given a soft flare to render them visible. 2 more flares were added for the opening of the jumpgate, and one to add heat to the explosion. I added a very light fractal bump map to all surfaces to give a somewhat weathered look, combined with pannel diffuse maps, I got a very "spacey" looking set of surfaces. The final picture was rendered with pure ray traced shadows, reflections, and refractions. NO SHADOW MAPS USED!