EMAIL: AmaltheaJ5@aol.com NAME: Michael Hough TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. COUNTRY: USA RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02 msdos TOOLS USED: Povray 3.02 windows and dos6.02 editor RENDER TIME: 30 hours 4 minutes HARDWARE USED: 486\DX2 20MB ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I first began with the notion of creating an image of the studio of an American landscape painter. I gave it some thought, and concluded that the idea didn't really appeal to me, and would probably appeal to others even less. So I turned to my favorite movies for inspiration. My three favorites are the Empire Strikes Back, 2001, and Alien. The first two have some great scenes, but what makes them so effective is the combination of dialog, music, and motion. Alien turned out to be the perfect subject, for I find the visuals in this picture to be outstanding. The scene inside the ship instantly came to mind. I find it amazing how so much thought and effort was expended by HRGiger and Ridley Scott for this seemingly small part of the film. I decided to focus on the pilot of the alien wreck because of the most clever way it foreshadows the later events in the film. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I began with the platform on which the pilot's chair rests. It is composed almost entirely of tori, cylinders, and box objects. They were either rotated to create the gear like objects, or translated to make the ridges on the pipes. I was using Povray for windows running under win32's, but soon had to switch to dos to stop the GPF's. The scene was split up into three parts to speed up the test renders. The platform was completed rather quickly, and the background took just a bit longer. I did run into a number of problems with the latter. I started with a large torus clipped by another torus of slightly lesser diameter. Then I rotated a large number of small tori perpendicular to the large one to create the ridges on the background. Then the declared background part was merely translated to fill the rest of the image. I tried a normal pattern at first, but it simply didn't look right. The pilot and the gun took the most time, but they also went the most smoothly. The pilot is just one big blob with some tori added for the ribs. I used alot of csg, mostly clipping and difference to carve the shape out. The 'gun' is composed of blobs and csg as well. I added a crackle normal pattern to get the chipped and tattered look to the gun and the pilot's head. I resisted the temptation to use more complex objects in order to keep the renders reasonably short. I think the fog was a nice touch, even though it was only present in the lower deck of the ship in the movie. I used a ground fog, to which I added a great deal of turbulence, so that it would look more like mist than fog. I considered using more lights, but I really liked how the one spotlight looked, so I decided to keep the lighting simple. Very few textures were used, but I designed them carefully to keep the scene subdued, but not too dark.