EMAIL: john.gwinner@cornell.edu
NAME: John D. Gwinner
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT 2005, John D. Gwinner.
TITLE: CoteoF-1
COUNTRY: United States of America
WEBPAGE: www.bigonmars.com
RENDER TIME: 56 minutes 19 seconds
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.6 
TOOLS USED:  Moray, PoseRay, Poser 5, World Machine, Leveller, Moray Domes plugin, Colefax City plugin
CREATION TIME: months ! which shows pretty low productivity
HARDWARE USED: Athlon Thunderbird, 2.0875 Ghz.  

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Mars is a stark place – bitterly cold, very little air, and what there is of it is Carbon Dioxide.  On the edge of the Valles Marineris, the largest domed city on Mars perches above the view.  The green grass of home is out of place in this stark lifeless landscape. 

The area in the image is centered at 10 degrees south by 285 east, overlooking Melas Chasma, one of the widest points in Valles Marineris; truly, this is a “City on the Edge of Forever”.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

The city is a heavily modified version of the Chris Colefax city plug in.  The city traces upwards against an object (the dome) to establish the max height of the buildings.

I used both Viking images for the color of the ground as well as some custom textures.  

The terrain data was imported from MOLA data, and then heavily processed through a series of programs.  I added detail with World Machine, through inverting the MOLA data (processed to 4kx4k) of the main Valles Marinaris.  I then cut out an inner portion, resized with Leveller to another 4k x 4k piece, and repeated the process.  This was done three times to yield every increasing scale.  I used a combination of adding roughness via various Perlin noise functions, slope selectors (World Machine), slope selection (Leveller), and some hand editing of the height fields.  The view is thus down to several meters across where the original Mars Orbiter (MOLA) data was kilometers per pixel.  You can judge how successful the effort to add 'real' detail was.

The height is NOT exaggerated.  Thus, the overall look of Valles Marinaris is what it would look like.  The only difference is that there is currently no curve to the horizon.  Leveller has a way to export height fields as curved triangle meshes, but I found that even one 4k height field was too much for this.

I did all of the modeling on the terrain, the city, as well as the trace() program to make the city buildings all fit exactly under the dome, as well as the textures.