EMAIL: m-kolb@uiuc.edu NAME: Michael J. Kolb TOPIC: Science Fiction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows (1.0) TOOLS USED: LViewPro (file conversion) RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: Pentium 75 MHz 24 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Remember the aerobraking scene in 2010? I wanted to create an image of an object entering the upper atmosphere of another world. I kept Jupiter with its layered atmosphere and many moons in mind, but other than that there's no specific references to any extraterrestrial object -- real or syndicated -- in the image. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Turns out this scene has about as much style as a C script. The stars, SkyBlue upper atmosphere, and Bronze mid-atmosphere are actually created as a sky_sphere object (keep it simple, stupid). The two moons are simply textured spheres. The "ship", as I think of it (it looks more like a regular old meteorite) is a combination of two halos within a Clear CSG object. Finally, the clouds (which were very freakin' tricky!) are made by creating a series of halos (with a #while loop) inside a generic flat Clear box. Adjusting the settings on the cloud halos took up the bulk of the design time. The scene was rendered using POV-Ray 3.0 for Windows (release 1.0) at 800x600 resolution with anti-aliasing set to (0.3). No large, faceless corporations were harmed in the creation of this image. For more information on me, check out: http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~m-kolb/