EMAIL: bleah@mbox4.singnet.com.sg

NAME: Zi En

TOPIC: First Encounters

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: Star light
       Star bright
       First meteor I see tonight

COUNTRY: Singapore

RENDERER USED: Fractal Ray Dream 05

TOOLS USED: Photoshop-to add name and convert to jpg

RENDER TIME: 2hr 9mins

HARDWARE USED: Pentium-166mmx, 64meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
The initial idea came from my fascination with the Nov 18th Leonid meteor
showers, when I waited ever so ardently for the first meteoroid to streak
through the nightsky. 
This image shows a solitary meteoroid radiating from the constellation Leo,
with an observing telescope.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The desert is simply a heightfield which had been smoothed out repeatedly.
One does not see jagged sand dunes. A second sand dune heightfield was also
positioned further into the scene and tilted slightly to face the camera to 
give the illusion of a huge desert of ever-more dunes. I also applied waves
to the texture of the sand to produce the ripples in the windblown sand, as 
highlighted by the car's headlights around the bottom right of the image.

A Fog primitive was placed above the sand to produce the cold, hazy feeling.

The stars are actually huge, distant balls of reflective metal. A bright 
spotlight was placed somewhere midway between the metal balls and the fore-
ground scene. To give the effect of brighter and dimmer stars, brighter stars
were just larger metal balls, and vice versa. The placement of the stars are
not random; I followed a starmap to create the constellation Leo (big, central
group), Leo minor (left), and part of Sextans (right).

The meteor was modelled using several Fountain primitives as the head, and a 
Fire primitive as the long trailing tail. The Fountains were given parameters 
such as upward velocity =0, maximum particle quantity, minimum particle size.

the telescope-magnified image of the meteor is a image map of the close-up 
raytrace of the same meteor. Again, the magnified stars are metal balls, except
that the spotlight in front of them had a cross-shaped gel. The image map was
applied to the end of the telescope, and a small spotlight was used to illuminate
the image map.