TITLE: Crescent

NAME: Lutz Essers
COUNTRY: Germany

EMAIL: lutz.essers@web.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.viadukt.de

TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: crescent.jpg
ZIPFILE: crescent.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5


TOOLS USED: 
    paint programm, digitized moon map (copyright information see
below)


RENDER TIME: 
    about 8 h


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III(?) 700 MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Decay is a savage stream across the endless time.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All objects were modeled in POV-Ray. 

Moon:
To get a natural surface I have used original 
moon data for the pigments. It was necessary to 
colorize the map a little bit and to improve some 
details with a paint program. I have used also the 
hole map for only the visible parts. The size 
reduction sharpened finally all surface structures 
to a satisfacting quality.

The broken parts were made by subtracting the 
sphere with heightfields which were made 
with the good old 'Fractal Landscape Generator' 
from 1993 (frgen.exe).

Debris:
The 3D-debris was made with julia_fractals by using 
low precision and high iteration values. Both due
to a real nice breakup of one element into several 
hundred real pieces per fractal. In this picture 
I have placed several hundred fractals to get these 
cloudlike structures. You can find a suitable fractal 
definition in the attached file to play with.

Small Rocks:
The flying rocks where made with the isosurface 
function (f_rounded_box-f_granite).

Larger Rocks (with craters):
The rocks which show some parts of moon surface
were made by subtracting a rock (as described 
above) with a crater-defining height_field function.

Stars (Speedlines):
The stars were made just by throwing some double 
cones into the deep space ...sometimes it is like
playing God. ;-)

Changes after reendering:
Using paint program to insert copyright information.


--------
Copyright information from "Visible Earth" for the 
used moon map:

"Unless otherwise noted, all images and animations made 
available through Visible Earth are generally not copyrighted. 
You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for 
educational or informational purposes, including photo 
collections, textbooks, public exhibits, and Internet web 
pages. This general permission does not include the 
NASA insignia logo (the blue "meatball" insignia)."