TITLE: Extrasolar
NAME: Gary R Arnold
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gameprog@jps.net
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: graexsol.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Proprietary

TOOLS USED: 
    None

RENDER TIME: 
    Approx 1.5 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II-266


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A young Earth-like planet orbits it's gas giant parent in a distant corner of
the sky. 
Remnants of the birthing nebula still glow faintly in this thick star cluster,
as a
face-on galaxy pinwheels is the far, far distance.

Inspired by the discovery of several extrasolar planets over the past few years,
this
image represents what one might actually find outside our solar system.  Perhaps
tidal
or radioactive heating from the parent gas giant warms 47 Ursae Majoris enough
to
support water and life.  Perhaps this is a planet no human will ever see, that
galaxy
in the background being our own Milky Way.  Perhaps.  We can only imagine --
perhaps
our children will not.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This image was rendered with proprietary software I'm currently devloping.  I
wanted
to write a program capable of generating very realistic looking planets of
various
types -- currently Earth-type, Jovian, Lunar, and Venusian.  In addition, an
hour-long
programming project gave rise to a so-so galaxy renderer.

I modified the program, which normally only renders one planet at a time, to
render
both planets, added the galaxy renderer to it, and wrote a quick starfield
renderer
also.  Changes to the scene were fairly laborious -- change the rendering
parameters,
recompile, run, examine output, change the parameters again, recompile, and so
on. 
Basically, I wrote a very specialized program that was made to render just this
one
image.  I suppose I need to write a front end soon, huh?

The gas giant is actually rather simple in execution -- a ringed wood-like
procedural
texture with some extra levels of turbulence added and gas giant-ish coloring. 
It
looks better rendered large than it does in this image.

The Earth-type procedural texture is composed of several layers of fractal and
multifractal noise, turbulence, and whirlpools, and was inspired by Ken
Musgrave's
similar work.  For this image, I used the cratering code from the Lunar renderer
to
add craters to an otherwise terrestrial planet.  I think the effect makes it
look a
bit younger and more battered.

The galaxy and starfield are really quick hack of simple fractal noise
functions. 
Most of the starriness was created by sampling very high frequency noise
functions,
giving it the grainy "can't quite make out any stars" look that actual
starfields have.

This image was rendered in Linux and The GIMP was used to add the title, etc.
info and
to JPEG the image.