EMAIL: davidray@ozemail.com.au NAME: David Ray TOPIC: First Encounters COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Distant Voyager COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.1 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro for conversion to JPG. RENDER TIME: 1 hour 44 minutes HARDWARE USED: 486dx2/66 20MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In 1977 Voyager 2 was launched from Earth on a mission to visit the outer planets from which masses of information was received greatly increasing our understanding of our solar system. Once it's mission was complete Voyager 2 headed out beyond the solar system into deep space never to return. Drifting for centuries beyond mankind's existence, it's internal power systems long since diminished, Voyager 2 stumbles into the trade routes of a peaceful alien civilisation. An alien ship, travelling on a beam of blue/white particles, detects Voyager 2 and dispatches a probe to investigate. This image is a snapshot of the probes initial scan. This moment is the alien civilisation's first encounter with anything not from it's world and this moment is destined, in time, to destroy their entire civilisation... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Goals : I had a couple of goals in mind at the beginning aimed at increasing my knowledge of POV-Ray's language (this is only my third scene hand coded and only my fourth scene ever - one using Moray). My goals were to not use any modelling tools whatsoever except POV-Ray for Windows' internal editor forcing me to do all my design work at the code level which taught me a great deal about the value of graph paper. The first object implemented was the Voyager 2 since it was a real object and the design of it was a given. Armed with as many images from the internet and the library as I could find I slowly built the voyager as a CSG consisting of around 900 individual basic objects (by far the most detailed object I have done). It is the only object in the scene to have a real life scale where 1 unit = 1 metre. Next I tackled the alien mother ship which I called the explorer (named before I determined it is actually a trade ship). I laboured over the design for this ship because I had very specific requirements. It had to be obviously alien and I wanted to suggest that the ship's hull is organic not metallic. So I started experimenting with a scaled lathe object and found a shape that I liked. Then I added a couple of small scaled spheres to one end of it (barely visible in the final ship) and thought it needed something more. So I added a couple of rotated/scaled/clipped torii to the top of it and liked the wing effect it gave but figured it looked more like a support than wings so I thought what can this be supporting? This is the moment where the particle beam road came to me and it just looked right adding to the alien-ness of the ship as it is so alien that it does not even operate on the same principles of propulsion as we would imagine. The organic texture was actually a borrowed texture from a planet in one of my previous projects. I am uncertain as to the origin of the texture and it may be the only portion of this scene which violated my "no tools" rule as I suspect it was designed in Texture Magic (may have even been a provided texture with that program). The final texture was modified by hand, however, to get the effect required. It was also used as the base texture for the "road" beam (heavily modified with many test renders) which I wanted to have streaks in it to imply motion along the length of the beam and to have some transparency to it. The probe was the object that gave me the most trouble and I am still not entirely happy with it. It had to have a look which implied that it belonged to the mother ship (was designed by the same species, etc) hence the repetition of the texture and the smaller beam used to control the probe from the mother ship's engine. In the end the probe was constructed as a simple CSG similar to the mother ship. The scanning beam is simply a scaled cone beginning at the front of the probe and ending just past the dish of the Voyager 2 or so it seems as the beam is actually a fair way in front of the voyager and does not intersect at all. Time constraints prevented me from getting a true intersection that looked right. The texture of the cone is partially transparent to give the impression of a particle beam and the colour was chosen to imply the beam comes from the particle beam road's beam. The stars were originally done using the provided star field textures on a sky sphere but when I began doing 800x600 anti-alised test renders I found the stars disappeared. I played around with the star field texture and finally decided to create my own starfield using actual sphere objects. I created a while loop which created a sphere and pushed it back into the scene a random distance between two adjustable values. Then the sphere's location would be rotated on the y and then the x axis a random amount again between two adjustable values. The sphere was coloured white and given an ambient value of 1 to make it shine without lighting. Repeated 3000 times this gives a very acceptable deep space star field which survives anti-aliasing. Rendered at 800x600 with anti-alias of 0.3 That's it. The only external tool I had to use was to convert the image to JPEG and that was Paint Shop Pro 4. Lost a little quality but not much. All the source is provided - feel free to try it. The only elements I would have liked more time on was the scanning beam to make it really intersect the voyager and the position and effect of the scenes lighting. And the design of the probe could use some work. My New Year's resolution is to enter at least every second round of this comp so feel free to critique the scene so I can learn. Dave.