EMAIL: dormammu@erols.com
NAME: Steve Reeves
TOPIC: Night -- Stills  (deadline:  April 30, 1998)
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Craft
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: Personal Web Page:  http://www.erols.com/dormammu
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.0
TOOLS USED: Moray, John Beale's Height Field Lab, Spark Generator, and a text editor
RENDER TIME: Twenty Six minutes and Twenty Six seconds at 640x480
HARDWARE USED: 486/66 with 16 Megs of Memory
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:  Simple picture of some kind of "craft" hovering at night.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
It took a rather long time to rend such a (relatively) simple image.. I pulled out John Beale's Height Field
lab to create the terrain.. first in .RAW format.. but I didn't feel like dealing with a 12 meg .RAW file,
so I re-saved it in .TGA format.  (which, btw, is only about 250k) .. then i used Moray to import the TGA
as a Height Field.  I scaled the terrain to the proper size, and then added the three spheres you see.  To
create the "lightning bolts" between them, I used Spark Generator.  (Sorry.. I forget the author's name :< )
I then created a very simple .POV file displaying the sparks and then used pov2mdl to convert it into a 
format Moray can handle.  I scaled and rotated the sparks so it looked like there were bolts of lightning
going between the spheres, then set my light source and rendered it.  This scene is supposed to take 
place on a Cloudy night in a Mountain, as seen by the lack of stars.  (Yes, I know it's called moon .. but
the original height field looked very much like the moon, but I eventually changed it.. but the old file name
stuck.)  Overall time it took to create this picture:  About 5 hours.  (including test renderings and the
final rendering)