TITLE: Saucer Monument
NAME: Natalia Morozova
COUNTRY: Russia
EMAIL: morozova@ict.tuwien.ac.at
TOPIC: Landmark
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: saucer.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Advanced Rendering Toolkit 1.1.0 raytracer, RGB mode

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for the background imagemap, xv for JPEG conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    35 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual PIII 450 running SuSE Linux 6.2

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Parent and child admire the monument for the first flying saucer that made 
alien contact a long, long time ago - with a race of strange, pale creatures 
with nonluminous eyes and smooth skin (ever since a popular theme in local 
horror films...). The object in the right forground is a sign that explains the

monument to the spectators.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The image was created as a student project at the Institute for Computer 
Graphics at the Vienna University of Technology in Vienna/Austria/Europe 
during this summer. Natalia Morozova is currently spending two semesters 
studying abroad in Vienna.

The scene was rendered with ART, the Advanced Rendering Toolkit developed 
at the Institute of Computer Graphics. The modelling was solely done in "text
mode" in the proprietary 3D file format peculiar to ART, with just the 
background texture map painted in Photoshop. Considerable effort went into the 
writing of some of the surface shaders.

This is the first image created with ART submitted to this contest; we thought 
we might get some technical credit for not only modelling the scene, but also 
for writing the raytracer that was used ;-)

The homepage of the rendering software can be found at

http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/rendering/ART/

At the moment they are somewhat out of date, since the few hackers at the 
institute that work on ART usually spend more time programming than documenting

(where have you heard that one before...)

ART will be released under the GPL Pretty Soon Now (TM), and we hope that some 
people will find it useful as a modern, flexible high-quality rendering system 
in the spirit of povray.

If you have questions concerning ART, do not e-mail the creator of the image, 
but a member of the ART team (@ddresses can be found on the ART webpages).