TITLE: Europa's Children
NAME: Robert Lee
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD
JPGFILE: europa.jpg
ZIPFILE: europa.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    IFranView, Little Gray Cells,
BioWin, make grass.


RENDER TIME: 
    about 1 day 4 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.7 Ghz Pentium laptop with
Windows XP


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    In the future, life will
be discovered on Jupiter's moon Europa.

After a trip through interplanetery space,
a delivery probe (upper left) will 
penetrate Europa's icy surface and release
a camera probe (center) into the subsurface
ocean.

Heat, generated within the moon from Jupiter's 
gravitational forces, allows life to flourish.

Jellyfish-like creatures float within a
a current of small bubbles.  Two plant-like
stalks can be seen in the middle-left. A
shelled creature sits on the sea floor
on the bottom left.

The delivery and camera probes are based on
actual NASA designs.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Thanks to Gilles Tran for his Makegrass macro.
Thanks to Justin Smith for his code to make
mountains.  I modified the code quit a bit;
but, it was the basis of one of the isosurfaces.

The picture was rendered with +w1024 +h768.  To 
reduce jaggies, +aa 0.3 was used.

Many tests were made with radiosity; however, 
the picture looked better without it.
  
The ground is made up of two isosurfaces: Justin 
Smith's mountain code plus an isosurface I used 
in another picture.

The Europan life formes were generated using
Biowin.  Each life form was textured to look
as authentic as possible.

There is one large area light in the middle of
the scene just below the icy surface and a dim,
shadowless light to fill in the foreground.  A
white sky sphere is also used above the icy
ceiling.

A watery media was added to make the scene look
like it was underwater.  The media fills the
volume of the scene.

I created the picture with conditional switches
so different parts of the scene could be rendered
with simple or complex textures, simple or 
complex lighting, etc.  This technique helped to
speed up development.  I left the conditional
statements in the code so others can see how
this is done.

Code for the grass mesh and biowin life forms
are stored in separate include files.

IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.