TITLE: Homecoming
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: planet.jpg
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray for Windows v3.5



TOOLS USED: 


        POV-Ray editor
        Paint Shop Pro 5&6



RENDER TIME: 


         1 hour 40 minutes



HARDWARE USED: 


        PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A solitary traveller returns to his home planet.


The huge dimensions of this image were necessary, IMO, to convey the emptyness
and vast scale of the scene. I wanted to make the spaceship look as tiny as
possible, without losing too much detail on it. I think the picture works even
though (or perhaps because) you have to scroll around to see it all. Apologies
to those who run their computers at a low res.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


You might notice I've entered two images into this round (the other one is "The
Sentinel"). Well, I had the idea for this one this morning, the last day of the
competition! After submitting my first entry, I decided I'd have a quick play
with this idea and see how it looked...

Well, roughly 15 hours later, it's now 5 hours to the deadline and I'm still
working on it! I already have a version that really captures the feeling I
wanted to convey, so I'm just experimenting with a few tiny refinements.

Some details about the scene:

Obviously, due to the total lack of time, this scene uses some pre-existing
elements. The planet is from an animation I'm currently working on for the
force of nature round (a WIP version was posted to povray.binaries.animations a
while ago), and the spaceship is lifted from my "Links" entry to the Worlds
Within Worlds round.

Most of the work I've done has been arranging the objects, working out some nice
lighting effects, and creating the media. The atmosphere of the planet and
exhaust flare of the ship were created specifically for this scene, and most of
the work went into the lighting and atmosphere to get that gorgeous halo effect
just right.

The scene is rendered without radiosity, to give truly pitch black shadows. This
really adds to the loneliness of the ship because it's in a vast area of total
black; the dark side of the planet.

I apologise for the lack of source with this image, it's such a quickly thrown
together scene that you really wouldn't want to see the source! If you have any
specific questions feel free to mail me.