TITLE: Night away from home.
NAME: Andy Johnson
COUNTRY: British
EMAIL: andy@sharry.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.sharry.demon.co.uk
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: nightafh.jpg
ZIPFILE: nightafh.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRAY 3.0
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TOOLS USED: 
    TerrainMaker, PaintShop, Wctv2pov
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RENDER TIME: 
    with no anti aliasing - 28mins 04Secs

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HARDWARE USED: 
    120 Pentium, 16 Meg RAM
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IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

------------------------------------------
    It's been fun, first entry, and I have enjoyed having to focus on
    a picture.  Have learnt lots about pov, and especially appreciated
    Chris's galaxy.inc  
    
    Looking forward to seeing the other entries.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

------------------------------------------
    To create the stars I used a pov include file (galaxy.inc), first
    off i create a background starfield and galaxy using a seed value.
    Then added to this are a few more galaxy objects to give a richer
    nebula look, along with a couple of spiral galaxies.  I have only
    begun to scratch the surface of this wonderfull INC file the
    author of which is Chris Colefax.  He can be contacted at :
    ccolefax@geocities.com and the file can be obtained (something I
    recommend you too do a.s.a.p. ) from his web site at
    http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/
    This is worth picking up, I would have included the source files
    but getting them from his site will ensure you have the latest
    copies, and besides he deserves the visits, :)

    The Spaceship was a Turbocad model, exported to DXF format, sucked into
    Wctv2pov and squirted back out to an INC file.  The INC file was then
    'tweeked' a little.  Something of an afterthought !

    The landscapes were produced using Terrain Maker, it didnt spend much time
    on them, and I dont find that i can control T/Maker that well yet.  The
    textures for the land are my own concotions, originaly they were created
    for use as paper textures and to give some nice 'tilable' images.  I didnt
    really get tham to work here, so they got replaced with a standarrd
texture.

    The water - well its water, perhaps a little to regular and i think the
    scale is a bit off.  Eventually the water metomorphosed into some sort of
    frozen, pock marked surface.

    The fog - well adds a certain something, i think, and besides it also hides
    some of the short comeings of the landscape textures ....., the fog was
then
    replaced with atmosphere, this proved difficult (for me) to get the desired
    effects and also exposed problems with the lights.

    The rendering was done with no aa.  With aa on you lose some of the
    quality of the water.  Also you lose some of the starfield detail, but I
believe
    that the all powerfull galaxy.inc may hold the key to retaining this lost
detail,
    i must look deeper.