EMAIL: mein@cs.umn.edu
NAME: Kent Mein
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: 3.0beta for SGI
TOOLS USED: the gimp,xv,  xpaint
RENDER TIME: (render for imagemap 6m43s, render for finished product 17m26s)
24m9s
HARDWARE USED: SGI INDY 133 MHZ (R4600)
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Since I saw a comment somewhere that said most "good" raytracings are images
that look "real" So I figured I'd try something that did not.
You may have to adjust The gama in this image because I rendered it on an sgi
and
a linux machine, when viewing on a machine with lower display quality it looks
dark.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Everything is pretty much straight forward.  I did the ground (mars.inc)
As a heightfield using crat_dat.pov to get my heightfield image.
I got the idea from the pov3demo/other directory.  I think it was easyer
to use than doing something like terrain maker.  However its a little more
involved and not very intuitive.

The earth (sky.inc) is just a textured sphere.  I created the texture
with the gimp (a paint program)  Its not very fancy but I think it did
the trick.

The stars (also in sky.inc) are a while loop with 4 random numbers
one for radius of the sphere and the other three are rotations to off set
the stars.

The sign (sign.inc) is just a couple of differences to remove the text
objects from the solid sign.

The Large gun off to the side (gun.inc) and Marvin himself (marvin.pov)
are half blob objects and half csg with the basic primiatives.  These two
objects are probably the coolest part of the picture.
Neat parts on the gun are the sign, which is an image map (acme.gif
that I created with the gimp)  Notice that its put once on a sphere
as a plane.  (So the rest of the sphere is invisable)  The big
blue sphere below it is part of a blob.  I use one other image map
on the gun that is the earth in the crosshairs (crosshair.gif)  This
is just a grab of a previous rendered earth and added in red lines to
form the crosshairs.

The neat bit about marvin is the hair.  I choped up a torus, then
put 5 of these hairs togeather to form a row, and then did a few
row objects. one direction and then a few the other direction.
The other hard bit is the red part of his body is all a big blob.  You
have to offset everything so you don't get large sphere shaped objects
at joints like the knees or elbow's.  At someplaces I even made them
seperate blobs so that it still looked like the meshed togeather smoothly.
It makes working with blobs alot easyer.

The ship off to the left of the image is the biggest object, its mostly
csg but I used the modeler ac3d to do the wing objects which are just an
extruded polygon.  I also tried doing the carrot decals with ac3d however 
the resulting files were too big for pov.  So I resorted back to csg by hand.
(carrot.inc)

To rebuild everything you'll need to do a do_pov crat_dat.pov
and then a do_pov marvin.pov,  Or an equivelant.