TITLE: Discovery
NAME: Norbert Kern
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: norbert-werner.kern@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: not yet
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: disvove.jpg
ZIPFILE: discove.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray v3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Quick3D, PosRay, HF-lab, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 

1. image
    parse 4 min / trace 9 h (2048*1536 AA 0.3)  peak memory 836 MB

2. post processing (with Pov-Ray)
    parse 14 min / trace 14 sec (1024*768; no AA) peak memory 874 MB

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.4 GHz Athlon C / 1.5 GB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Martians find a weird archeological artefact, a weathered bronze 
statue of obviously human origin on deimos. The reversal of our 
perception of an extraterrestrian tenor is the surreal motif. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

End of august I had a free weekend and began a quick and easy entry 
for this round.
 
The mars is an isosurface. Maps for mars and the small moon on the 
left are from http://planetscapes.com/maps/mars.html. Emitting media 
simulate the thin and varable mars atmosphere.

The venus head is a scanned Igea model from http://planetscapes.com/
maps/mars.html. The model was converted from ply to 3ds formate with 
quick3d (http://www.quick3d.com/) and to pov formate with PoseRay3.0.1
(http://user.txcyber.com/~sgalls/). The texture is based on Kari 
Kivisalo's fantastic Patina/grime trick (http://news.povray.org/povray.
binaries.images/17820/).

The ground is an old heightfield made with HF-lab (http://beale.best.
vwh.net/gforge/). The tripod is a model from http://members.ozemail.
com.au/~dproc/. The dark structure at the rear part is made with the
madpipe macro from Gilles Tran (http://www.oyonale.com/ressources/
english/sources08.htm). Stars are added with galaxy include by Chris 
Colefax (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/galaxy.html).

A total of 40.000 stones are scattered on the heightfield and the head.
To save time the positions were generated by seperate files and saved 
as include files.
 
As in my last 3 entries the resulting image was postprocessed within 
Povray for better antialiasing.

The zip file does not contain the meshes because of their size and
the imagemaps are scaled down for the same reason. The separate files
for postprocessing and the sone positions are included in the zip.
The complete source has ca. 231 MB. 
If anybody wants it, feel free to contact me.