EMAIL: ffrog@geocities.com
NAME: Sean O'Malley
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Biosphere
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/~ffrog
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Moray, Paint Brush Pro (BMP->JPG), L-System generator
RENDER TIME:
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 300 Mhz / 48 megs RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Winter at a simple biosphere on a planet far, far away.  (Winter - that
explains the dead tree!)  It was originally going to have more plants but 
couldn't fit everything in properly because of resolution difficulties and
because I wanted more of the sky to be showing. (Sphere actually has some 
detail obscured, such as a stairway, but...)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

It's obvious how the sphere was made. :)  It has an emission medium
inside to produce the blue haze.  To create the planet, I took an
image map of Neptune and reddened it (I was going to use
Jupiter but that would be too obvious - I wanted the planet to
look more fictional!).  No lens or flare effects (besides, 
obviously, changing the lens focus parameters) were used in the 
development of this; the strange optical appearance of the sphere was 
an artifact of the way it was made.  The nebulae in the background were 
produced (with a heavy amount of tweaking and editing) with ideas from 
Chris Colefax's Galaxy include.  The tree was made using an L-system.  
I *wish* I could've fit more organics into this,  but I like the panoramic 
view of the way the scene's set up now.