EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com
NAME: Bob Franke
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: First Encounter
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1a (Windows 95)
TOOLS USED:
  POV-Ray editor
  Ronald L. Parker's TorusSpline macro
  Chris Colefax's Coil Generator
  John P. Beale's Height Field Lab (HF-Lab)
  Photostyler for jpeg conversion

RENDER TIME: 19 hours 47 minutes
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133 w/ 128 Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
First encounter... our surveyor robot meets theirs.

This scene takes place about 150 years in the
future, 67 light years away, on a moon in the
star system HD210277.  This is a Sun-like star
slightly larger than our Sun with a Jupiter
sized planet, in an orbit slightly larger that
the Earth's.  Although life is not expected on
this large gas planet, life may be possible on
one of its moons.  This is the first extra-solar
search for life by I-Seti.

Although the moon is lifeless, the search has
achieved an unexpected success.  Our simple
robot has encountered a highly advanced
surveyor robot from an unknown star system.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
The earth robot is based on the very
successful Mars Sojourner with the
articulating bogie suspension, capable of
traversing very large rocks.  The earthbot is
equipped with two 3D cameras and an arm with
sensor arrays in the fingers of the gripper.
The earthbot is made with simple CSG methods.
The wiring, to the motors inside the wheels,
was done with Ronald Parker's TorusSpline
macro. Chris Colefax's Coil Generator was used
for the electrical wiring up to the ccd
cameras on the InputTower.

The alien robot is a sphere surrounded with
three force fields.  These fields provide both
movement and sensory perception.  The alienbot
is made with CSG and three torii with media
interior.

The landscape is made with three height
fields, created with HF-Lab.  A macro was used
to create the rocks by combining a bunch of
random boxes and spheres.

The sky is a sky_sphere and a large inner
sphere with a simple cloud texture.  The
highly toxic atmosphere is a ground fog.

The mother planet is a sphere with several disks 
for the rings and is located between the two "sky"
spheres.  The planet uses a black and white
texture and is made fairly transparent to give
the illusion of distance.

To save space, the files for the height fields
are not included with the source code.

Well that's about it.  I hope you like the
image.