EMAIL: Emory_Stagmer@amecom.com
NAME: Emory R. Stagmer
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV 3.0 (DOS)
TOOLS USED: DOS Edit, Fractint, PhotoShop(heightfield image ONLY!)
RENDER TIME: 101 hours 48 min
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133Mhz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

               Danger Will Robinson!
  
  I've got to say right off the bat, I'm not a big _Lost In Space_ (LIS) fan.
I did always like The Robot however (yes that's his name, 'The Robot').
So when the SciFi topic was announced, I thought I'd do something hopefully
a little different, 'classic' SciFi.  I admit it could be argued that
LIS dosen't qualify as 'classic', but I'm not here to debate that...
Anyway here he is, from a promotional shot for the show's 23rd season! ;^)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
  
  The toughest thing about this was he had to look RIGHT.  Not just good or
cool, but RIGHT.  The proportions, textures, colors, size, etc all had to
match.  I did go out on the internet and find 3 pictures of The Robot so
I could make sure he matched.  The pictures I had were grabbed from a
TV source, so they're not real good, and the colors are VERY washed out,
so I did take some artistic license there.
I think I used every primitive except for splines.  And there's some very
complex CSG in here.  The toughest things specifically were his glass head,
and what I call the v_torus, that glass <==> shaped thing above his torso.
  
  Once I had created The Robot, he had to be somewhere.  So I put him in a TV
studio soundstage.  There are three area spotlights on him (key,fill, & back)
and there are a grid of wash lights over the rest of the stage.  The 
background is a scrim curtain lit from above and below with flood lights.
The rocks are one heightfield definition that is scaled and placed and
textured 4 different ways to make it look like different rock outcroppings.
The sand of the floor is VERY plain, but time prevented me from doing more.
I'd like to have put a ripple wave on it, and then also put some
tread tracks from the robot in there, but alas it's 30-oct-1996 and I'm
out of time! 
  
  There are 2 slope maps in here.  The first is for the brushed_aluminum
texture I made almost everything out of.  I could only make the map as
small as I did (technically it should be MUCH smaller) because if I made
it any smaller, I got a moire pattern on the metal.  The second slope map
is on the treads.  I would have preferred to place individual boxes to make
the gripper part of the tractors, but a slope map took me less than 5 minutes
and looks almost as good.

P.S. Just this last week a new store opened up near work.  It's called
'Danger Will'! AND there's a toy robot in the window!  They won't sell it
though... :^(