EMAIL: mjhammel@csn.net
NAME: Michael J. Hammel
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for Linux
TOOLS USED: geodome, genf, hflab, graph paper, ruler, mechanical pencil
RENDER TIME: 
Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes  45.0 seconds (45 seconds)
Time For Trace:   10 hours 33 minutes  36.0 seconds (38016 seconds)
    Total Time:   10 hours 34 minutes  21.0 seconds (38061 seconds)
 
HARDWARE USED: 486DX2/66, 48M memory
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A lonely outpost somewhere in the middle of a space faring civilization.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
There are a number of parts to this image:  the planets, the moon in the
foreground, the stars, the radio dishes, and the city-dome and connecting
tubes.

The planets were originally in another image I had done called ss-one.  The
only thing that remains from that image are the Saturnian rings of the main
planet.  I didn't change this at all.  The saturnian planet, the bright
planet to the right, and the moon of the secondary saturnian planet were all
in the original image, but their textures were greatly modified for this
image.  The main saturnian planet has 3 layers, each with its own set of
textures applied.  It also has an internal light source to make it
brighter.  Getting the textures right took about 2 weeks of trial and
error.  I'm still not quite satisfied - I'd like a little more swirl in the
clouds instead of the long, thing whispy clouds I ended up with.

The foreground moon was a simple heightfield created using John Beale's
HF-Lab.  It only took about an hour to create it, add some craters and fit
it into the overall image.  Considering the important role it plays I'd say
that was time well spent.

The stars are a series of boxes far off in the distance with a series of
bozo textures applied.  There is a little too much red and blue in there,
but I thought something besides plain ol' white stars would be more
interesting.

The radio dishes were modelled by hand using graph paper.  They were also
in that other image but used in a much different way.  The dishes are
geometrically correct, so positioning them was actually pretty easy.  I
used some of POV-Ray 3.0's conditional statements to create all 10 of the
dishes and randomly rotate them based on which side of the array they were
on.  The dishes are supposed to be relaying from one direction to another.
I have no idea if this makes any sense from a physics point of view.

The city dome and the radio dishes maintenence dome are made using the geodome
utility.  The city dome has a glass dome covered by a wire frame dome and 
actually sits in a crater of the moon.  I don't think its an exact fit - if 
you view it from above it might not look right.  The objects inside the dome 
are just to show an interior section - there are a couple of truss objects 
made with my genf tool and some simple boxes and spheres.  There are also a
series of 12 lights around the interior of the dome that are not visible
but which provide the light to make the inside of the dome visible.  The
connecting tubes are simple cylinders connected to some boxes that act as
anchors for the radio dishes.

I think the two most important aspects of this image are the textures used
on both the planets/rings and the city dome (see the reflected stars in the
dome?) and the use of lights.  The latter is one item often overlooked 
by newbies, IMHO, because it adds alot of time to the rendering.

Questions or requests for the source can be sent to mjhammel@csn.net.