EMAIL: grasshoppah@earthlink.net
NAME: Dave Blandston
TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Dave Attacks!
COUNTRY: Communist Republic of America
WEBPAGE: http://home.earthlink.net/~grasshoppah/povers/index.html
RENDERER USED: POV 3.1g
TOOLS USED: Sharp model EL-506A Scientific calculator, Human brain v0.001 Beta, VideoMach
CREATION TIME: About 24 days to render, 5 minutes to convert to .mpg
HARDWARE USED: Athlon 700MHz, 128MB RAM
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Makes a lovely screen saver (full-screen mode recommended!)
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
The alternate title of this animation is "Space Clichè." The
320x240 version of the animation looked terrible in full-
screen mode, so please forgive the 640x480 size, but it was
necessary in order to achieve acceptable results. This is a
320-frame cyclic animation.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
The first step was to watch the movie Mars Attacks! a couple
of times. I used CSG to make the UFOs. One interesting
feature about the UFOs is that, like the Mars Attacks! UFOs,
the bottoms can open up like a lens aperture. But they don't
in this animation. The spooky green glow and the atmosphere
around the Earth are made of media (emitting and scattering,
respectively.)

One problem that I encountered was that due to the random
placement of the UFOs, some would overlap. I added simple
collision detection by making sure that an imaginary box
enclosing each UFO did not intersect any other UFO boxes.

The stars were generated by Chris Colefax's excellent Galaxy
Include File. The image map of Earth is from The Living Earth,
Inc. I used a free bump map of Earth that I found at one of
Ken's links, but I can't remember where.