TITLE: Nova
NAME: David LeMasters
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dlemasters2@comcast.net
TOPIC: Explosion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.6 Windows/Linux
TOOLS USED: VideoMach, Windows Paint
CREATION TIME: ~4 hrs running concurrently on 3 machines
HARDWARE USED: AMD 3200+ Windows XP Home, 2.4G P4 Mandrake Linux 9.2, AMD 1G Windows XP Home
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS:
Windows Media Player 10, Movie Player for Linux
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:
A star is dying.  Though the chances of success are small, a desperate civilization is willing to try anything to revitalize their sun.  Giant Solar Laser Stabilizers are built, moved into position, and fired.  It appears to be working, the sun brightens.  A moment later the unimaginable happens.  The expanding gas shell thrown off by the sun disintegrates all objects in its path.  As the gas expands it cools, changing color from white to yellow to orange to red, finally it becomes invisible as it cools into the infrared.  All that remains is a small solitary white dwarf.    
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:
The sun is a sphere with a bozo pattern with a slightly larger sphere also a bozo pattern but with a color map that varies as a function of time.  The planets are also spheres with a bozo pattern.  The planets disintegrate using the same method as the nova shell, just quicker and smaller. The ship is just plain csg.  When the ship is consumed by the nova the texture of each component is changed to a bozo pattern in the same manner as the nova shell.  The rocket exhaust is formed with a density function.  The star field is just many small white spheres with a high ambient value randomly scattered around.  After rendering, VideoMach was used to create the final mpg.  Windows Paint was used to convert one of the stills to jpg format for the poster.