EMAIL: msarns@ufl.edu NAME: Maurice Sarns TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Meanwile, 130 miles south of the geographic north pole... COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.afn.org/~afn29467/ RENDERER USED: MacMegaPov0.7 X PPC feb 2 2001 TOOLS USED: MacMegaPov0.7 X PPC feb 2 2001, Photoshop RENDER TIME: 2 hours 50 minutes HARDWARE USED: Macintosh G4 350 mhz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Fortress of Solitude (tm), just as Big Blue (tm) is off on an errand ...probably just Brainiac (tm) messing with the Van Allen belts (tm: Jack Kirby, I'm sure) again. For the comic geeks out there, this portrayal is based on Curt Swan's (tm) final rendition of the Fortress (tm) in the gotterdamurung (C:Richard Wagner) two-parter from 1986, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" (C) --as is the quote, from the _auteur_, Alan Moore. 'Gold Key' (tm) details are according to the "Limited Collectors' Edition Presents: Superman (tm) vs the Flash (tm)" special Fortress of Solitude (tm) section from 1976. All trademarked and copyright characters, subjects, and writing cited and alluded to in this work remain completely the property of their respective holders. Really. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The mesas are a height field, hand-crafted in PhotoShop. The Mesas and plane are covered with a surface normal for all that ginchy surface detail. --I have long puzzled about how snow would glue on to the sheer face of a mesa, but, if that is the way Mr. Swan thought it should look, that's the way I'll do it. Three fogs: One a broad 1-foot-high absorption ground fog that blurs the horizon and reduces reflection from the plane. The second a 12-foot-high emitting fog aroud the base of the Fortress mesa that blurs the abrupt change from height field to plane. The third is a big cylinder filled with an absorption fog to darken and smooth the scene. Horizon: A CSG cylinder with pigment=black encircles the scene to cut off stars at the horizon. An emitting sphere with a gradient layered on a cylindrical pattern provides the horizon glow. Star Field courtesy of Chris Colfax Galaxy Generator: http:// Aurora is an emitting CSG cylinder with a density composed of a color map on a gradient y, run through waves, and then put through a cylindrical pattern with a frequency of 10. It doesn't make a lot more sense when you see the code. The streak representing Big Blue is a tear-shaped CSG with alternating blue and red emitting densities. Key and Door are CSGs with a gold texture. Border and narrative captions are two CSGs, painfully aligned to the front of the camera (Do that first, next time.) and set as a "looks_like" light source with a major falloff.