TITLE: Huygen's Wake
NAME: Matthew Corey Brown
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: xenoarch@mindspring.com
WEBPAGE: http://xenoarch.home.mindspring.com
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: xa2004.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    SuperPatch of Povray 3.1a for Windows (With personal patches that
are upcoming to Superpatch)

TOOLS USED: 
    spatch, hf-lab

RENDER TIME: 
    15h 29m 23s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 180

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        It's November 27th, 2004, and the Cassini probe has sent 
the Huygen probe on its first and last encounter with Titan. Oddly
its a remarkly clear day at the landing sight. (normally there is
haze 120 miles thick on the ground) Unfortunatly its visible and IR
cameras were damaged on the interplantary journey. It landed into
a lake of liquid ethane. Finished its life after sending its scientific
data back to Earth and sank, with its parachute fluttering down as
its funeral shroud.

        Sentry B-32X of The Recon Mission to the Ringed planet of System
ZE325 awoke to its proximity alarm. Scanning the area it notices an artifical 
metal object nearby. Doing a quick scan it deduces its from the chattering
species
from the 3rd planet of this system. Hopefully it looks for some sort of visual
recording device. It find one but determines it's been damaged just as the
parachute covers the probe. It mourns the first encounter with humans, for it
was just one way. Reluctantly it continues scanning in hopes of find something.

Note: NASA and ESA logos used without permission. They are used for artistic
expression only and is by no means an endorsement by either agency for this
image. (I don't want my first encounter with their lawyers =} ) ANd yes I know 
the Worm is no longer the Offical Logo of Nasa any more, but i liked it better 
and its not endorsed by them anyways.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The ethane lake is made with a wrinkle patterned height_field
with angle based reflection and blurred reflection (granted its not all that
noticeable. i love superpatch)

The parachute is just 8 bpatches i made in sPatch and the logos are
an image map uv_mapped to the bezier patch. (Did I mention i love SuperPatch?)

The hills are a hf i made in hf-lab. (I love HF lab too)

Saturn is a sphere in a disc

The Moai/Watcher/Sentry was done in sPatch. The Eyelights
are area lights with projected_through shapes identical to the shape
of the eyes. (projected_through is a patch i wrote
that only allows light rays that pass through a specified object. It
will be in the after christmas 98 release of Superpatch) I then dumped
that portion of the scene in a box with a scattering media. All
to have beams project from the sentry's eyes. 
I had some trouble with the backlighting of breizer patches so i had to make
subsection patches to keep the areas around the eyes unlitted.

I also used a fill light but I used my light_groups patch (also will be in
after xmas '98 superpatch) so the dark side of Saturn wouldn't be lit.