TITLE: Sea of Tranquility
NAME: J D Craig
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: AzChip@aol.com
TOPIC: The Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sot.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    RayDream Studio 5.5

TOOLS USED: 
    RayDream Studio 5.5, Photoshop for rocks, textures and _ notice

RENDER TIME: 
    5 minutes

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A father and son pose for a snapshot in front of the historical first manned
landing site on the moon.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I hadn't planned on entering this stills competition until I thought of the Sea
of Tranquility, the landing site of the first Apollo mission.  

I based the astronaut figure on the excellent figure by Viewpoint labs.  This
figure (miniaturized and repositioned for the child) is constructed from the
ground up, though.  It involves using RayDream's free-form modeller, a spline
based editor.  The textures on their suits are procedural, using a marble
operator to give the variations in intensity.  The lunar landscape is made in
the terrain editor, a height-field editor incorporated in RDS.  The LM bottom
stage is constructed from primitives and textured with a cellular shader to
give the impression of the crumpled foil.  

The rocks are built in Photoshop.  Yes, photoshop.  A free plug-in is available
called cybermesh 32.  It uses greyscale images as height-fields and generates a
3D model mapped on a plain, cube or sphere.  Fun toy!

The earth is a sphere with a ocean/land texture mapped on it.  I put a fog
object around the sphere for the atmosphere.

It's not a particularly spectacular image, but I thought it was a fun idea, and
hope you enjoy it.