EMAIL:f00@freenet.de
NAME:Jonas Weigt
TOPIC:Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE:Circles
COUNTRY:Germany
WEBPAGE:http://www.starportinfinity.com (Currently Under Development)
RENDERER USED:POV-Ray 3.5
TOOLS USED:None
RENDER TIME:2days 10hours 37minutes
HARDWARE USED:AMD Duron 700Mhz, 256 MB Ram, Win98SE
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:A Mechwarrior discovering his own Mechs footsteps in the desert,realizing in this moment that he is alone, having run in circles for hours, hopelessly trapped in the vast and cruel sands and never again able to find his home... Unless he repairs the battle-worn navigation system.
I have been using POV-Ray since August the 9th 2002, being my first (serious) attempt in Raytracing. Even though my skills are not yet adequate, I decided to submit this as an entry for the IRTC. 
I had the base idea for the Mech a few days after beginning to learn
POV-Ray, though I had no knowledge of the IRTCs existence. Later, when I came to know the Competition and the current topic.
After modelling the Mech object entirely from CSG, basically using simple shapes like spheres, boxes, splines etc., I began working on the textures, whereas I quickly came up with ideas on the background. I wanted the scene to carry the topic, "loneliness", via different aspects of the picture. The aspect ratio of 16:9 increases the feeling of a vast space, in which the Mechs pilot would be hopelessly lost, namely the desert which I created via a height_field. I wanted to increase the feeling of eerieness and strangeness by making the desert, the fog and the lights rather unrealisticy bright and from a unusual angle. I used media and normal ground fog for the glow, and a bright area_light sun in front of the camera. Radiosity was also used.
THANKS:Many people in the povray.binaries.images newsgroup helped me during the creation process on problems I encountered, and I want to express my thanks to all of them.