TITLE: The Destroyer NAME: Mick McMullin COUNTRY: Ireland EMAIL: mickmcm@indigo.ie TOPIC: Flight COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: destroy.jpg ZIPFILE: destroy.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.00e for Windows TOOLS USED: Texture Magic, Paint Shop Pro (for titles and JPEG conversion) RENDER TIME: 1h 12m 18s HARDWARE USED: Pentium 90 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Some Robot biker dude who's making good use of the new laser canon on his flying bike. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I created this image without any external modellers, just entering text into the editor. However, I created new textures a few days ago with Texture Magic and substituted them in. I'll definitely be registering this program and I'd recommend it to anyone. The sky is a textured sphere which wasn't looking right until I moved the subject matter nearer the top rather than in the center. It's obvious when you think about it - there's more atmosphere between you and the horizon than there is above your head. I'd like to say that I came up with such a simple but effective trick, but I'd be lying of course - I got it from a posting in the raytracing newsgroup made by Nick Stevens. The ground was simply a smaller sphere sharing the same centre point as the sky. The clouds above the ground were a little tricky to get right; transparent textures on spheres just didn't seem to work. In the end I used POV's halo function which I scaled appropriately. The flying bike was the easiest bit as it was very much improvised. To add detail, I simply repeated a few basic elements but scaled them differently and unevenly. The robot figure wasn't too difficult either. I had created a figure template for my other entry, Angel, so I just used different values and added a bit more detail. Source code is included - feel free to use & enjoy! Mick. -----