EMAIL: daffyduckx@hotmail.com
NAME: Matthew Welch
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Lunar
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~daffy-duck/raytrace/raytrace.htm
RENDERER USED: povray 3.1
RENDER TIME: 3 minutes 47.0 seconds (227 seconds)
HARDWARE USED: PentiumII 266
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
With the topic of landmarks coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the
Apollo 11 moon landing I'm sure there will be about a dozen submissions
like this one. Plus, I'm sure the subject has been done before, but I
went ahead and did it anyway.

I worked off an old set of drawings I found on a NASA educational materials
web site. It had nice scale drawings and assembly instructions for building
models of several different spacecraft. I also worked from a couple dozen
pictures taken on the moon.

I did not include any stars because all the pictures I found showed a black
sky. Does anyone know why this is? Is it some kind of photographic side
effect?

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The lander is all CSG. The texture for the descent stage was the toughest
part. It doesn't really look anything like the pictures I have, but it
gets the idea (shiny and crinkly) more or less. The ascent stage was
actually highly reflective, but when I rendered it that way, it just came
out mostly black, which might be more accurate but looked awful, so I added
some color.

The moon's surface is a height field with a granite surface normal. The
earth is a sphere with an image map and a slightly larger sphere with a
transparent bozo texture.