EMAIL: m-kolb@uiuc.edu
NAME: Michael J. Kolb
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows (1.0)
TOOLS USED: LViewPro (file conversion)
RENDER TIME:
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 75 MHz
               24 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Remember the aerobraking scene in 2010? I wanted to create an image of
                   an object entering the upper atmosphere of another world. I kept Jupiter
                   with its layered atmosphere and many moons in mind, but other than that
                   there's no specific references to any extraterrestrial object -- real or 
                   syndicated -- in the image.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Turns out this scene has about as much style
  as a C script. The stars, SkyBlue upper atmosphere, and Bronze mid-atmosphere are actually
  created as a sky_sphere object (keep it simple, stupid). The two moons are simply textured
  spheres. The "ship", as I think of it (it looks more like a regular old meteorite) is
  a combination of two halos within a Clear CSG object. Finally, the clouds (which were
  very freakin' tricky!) are made by creating a series of halos (with a #while loop) inside
  a generic flat Clear box. Adjusting the settings on the cloud halos took up the bulk of
  the design time.

  The scene was rendered using POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows (release 1.0) at 800x600 resolution
  with anti-aliasing set to (0.3).

  No large, faceless corporations were harmed in the creation of this image.

  For more information on me, check out:
    http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~m-kolb/