TITLE: Evening visitor
NAME: Bill Pragnell
COUNTRY: Great Britain
EMAIL: wmp506@bham.ac.uk
WEBPAGE: None at present
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: evening2.jpg
ZIPFILE: evening2.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVray 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    No others

RENDER TIME: 
    approx 30 mins

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 266, 16MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This image takes the predictable form of an alien
encounter theme. On a lonely expanse of remote countryside, a bizarre
spacecraft sets down near a solitary log cabin. (Probably inhabited by
some poor soul whom no-one's ever going to believe).
IMAGE CREATION DESCRIPTION: The image was hand-coded entirely within
the POV-ray 3.0 editor. Both the ground and distant mountains were
built up by trial and error using layered wrinkle patterns as
height-fields in POV-ray itself. In order to prevent raised edges
due to image edges, I faded the wrinkle textures to black on the
visible sides. The sky is just the standard plane of turbulent bozo.
The spacecraft is something I thought might look more original and
alien - it is the result of several hours judicial mucking about with
julia fractals. Both the exhaust plume and flaming crater in the
ground are halo effects (good fun making those). The log cabin was
a last-minute thing really - I was going to try an ambitious
surprised-looking human figure, but buildings are so much easier.
The logs are really textured all the way through with tree-rings,
but sadly I had to scale the thing down for the sake of realism and
all my attention to detail is almost invisible. Shucks.