EMAIL: jonestb@eng.auburn.edu NAME: Ben Jones TOPIC: Time COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.0 Beta 6 for Linux TOOLS USED: none RENDER TIME: 0 hours 8 minutes 48.0 seconds (528 seconds) HARDWARE USED: Dx2/66 32megs RAM running Linux IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Nexus from Star Trek: Generations approaching a planet. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I started out with the goal of using the new halo feature of POVRay combined with the new loop feature to make a whole bunch of halos that fit along a slightly modified sine curve. Well, the idea WORKED, but it looked awful and absolutely nothing like the Nexus. So I tried to make one big object out of a union of cylinders made with the same loop and then attach a halo to the union, but that turned out even worse. Finally, I discovered the simplest thing possible: Take a plane, apply a marble pigment with a pinkish color map and cut out one of the stripes with a clip. PERFECT! (Well, at least for me.) Then, I wanted to make a decent looking planet so I would have something else in the scene, but the standard bozo pigmented planet just didn't look real enough to me anymore. I was sifting through the online docs when I happened upon the new texture_map feature and decided that it was the perfect idea (since I could use the actual water texture for the watery parts), and so I made up a little land texture (which somehow turned out to have nice coastlines) and used the water texture [which turned out to have appearances of different depths (nice work guys)]. Finally, there was the star that I decided to stick in there (still trying to use a halo somewhere), and started with just a halo, but I never could get anything decent out of it. I ended up using a spotted pigment with an orange/yellow color map and then, yes, I put a halo around it.