EMAIL: stratbue@in.tum.de NAME: Sebastian "Chano" Stratbücker TOPIC: Landscapes COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Beacon COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: www.chano.de RENDERER USED: povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: none RENDER TIME: 20h 46 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium III at 0.6 GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A red-glowing beacon, sticking in the dusty surface of a moon that surrounds an earth-like planet. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Since I had no possibilities to create realistic plants or other natural shapes, using only the POV-Raytracer, I decided to build a rather lifeless environment. So I remembered the photographs of the rising earth, that were shot by astronauts on the moon : bright shining moon dust, hard shadows thrown by rocks and the blue tiny planet on the horizon. The moon was made quickly out of an iso-sphere, and also the randomly placed rocks were soon looking quite realistic. But after the first test renders, I recognized a nasty problem. The dark side of the rocks (because I only used one light source : the sun) looked extremely flat and I couldn't manage it to use radiosity with good results taking render-time that ranged within a week. The solution of this problem came with the POV-Ray logo, which I had planned to put in my scene anyway. So I applied a glass material on it, and placed a red glow in the center of the sphere. Now I had my flat spots disappearing and by the way I could use the photons feature for the glass logo. Even if my scene doesn't exactly fit the "landscape topic", I think it shows an important aspect of nature : the huge contrast between any living planet and the remaining dead matter in this universe. So I look at the pov logo as a beacon that leads you to a stand point far away from human activity, where you can consider things from a certain distance. Technical remarks -the star texture is taken from "stars.inc" and applied on a hollow sphere -moon,rocks, planet and clouds are isosurface objects, functions are taken from "functions.inc" -the relief of the moon surface is a combination of various functions, describing an isosurface object like this : f_sphere - f_agate * f_noise3d -similarly the rocks are formed : f_sphere - f_hetero_mf- f_agate * f_noise3d (for further details see the povray source file "beacon.pov") -the planet is a union of various spheres -the relief of the land is done by an isosurface -the sea is just a blue sphere, with little dents in the normal -the thin clouds are provided by a texture from "skies.inc" -the fat clouds are a CSG difference of an isosurface similar to the functions shown above, and a sphere, that is bigger than the "sea sphere" to make them hover in the atmosphere. -the atmosphere itself is a hollow sphere having media inside with blue scattering -the beacon is originally ment to be the official POV-Ray logo. I only changed the sphere into a hollow one, and put a light source in it. The caustic light effects are provided by a photon map, which is saved in the "beacon.ph" file.