TITLE: Alien Pyramids NAME: Micah Ellison COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: micasoftxx@hotmail.com TOPIC: Landmarks COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: alienpyr.jpg ZIPFILE: alienpyr.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray RENDER TIME: Oh man, I didn't record it ... it was less than 45 minutes, though. HARDWARE USED: A little Pentium 120 laptop w/ 32 megs of RAM and Win95. It really helps to hook up a larger monitor (even if it's four years old) and then there's always a mouse that beats the touchpad. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Well, first I wanted to make a nice picture of the pyramids. It would be beautiful and inspirational. Then I got real and decided to make it interesting. I modeled it after a photo of the Great Pyramid my parents had taken, then put aliens above it. The aliens are turning the rising desert dust into the wonder that is the Pyramids. The date? Eight thousand B.C. There's still a little moisture left in the desert from the Ice Age, so the dunes aren't so big (erosion). And no, I don't really believe in this stuff ... it's just fun to depict. Anyway, everyone knows that it was the people from Atlantis that built the pyramids, not the aliens. :-) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The pyramid itself: I went on the Internet to various pyramid-related sites. I found the dimensions of the pyramids. I made a tapering sweep of a square, then scaled it xy to 2.3. I used a calculator to find the tangent of 55 degrees (the angle of the real pyramid is actually 54 degrees and 54 minutes), then I multiplied it times 2.3 to get 2.8111, which is the height of the pyramid. I didn't worry about texturing the pyramid well because I knew it was going to be a silhouette, so I gave it the same texture as the desert. The desert sand: I just made a plane with that color, then added a granite normal with a bump dempth of 0.5. It worked out beautifully ... I wasn't going for that dune look, I just didn't want it flat. The alien saucer: The saucer looks so different when viewed seperate from this scene. It's a rotational sweep, and I didn't close it at the bottom (on purpose). The hole is were the beam comes from. I layered two textures for this saucer - an onion colormap (it's totally black except for yellow concentric rings of light) and dents (scaled down to represent little yellow lights). It looks really bad unless in this setting ... but it's made only for this setting. The beam: It's media, and I love it. I made a texture with a granite density and an emission color of rgb 0, .75, .75 (kinda like teal). The beam is a rotational sweep going from the hole in the saucer to a circle around the pyramid. The lense flare: It's a predefined one in Moray called TV-Day. It's set to the only light in the scene, which is the sun. The sun's coordinate values are 500, 900, 190 (z being up). It has to be that far away for realistic shadows. This is even more frustating in a scene with columns (the shadows aren't parallel). That's why this is the only day scene that I'm proud of ... night scenes are so much easier (and look cooler anyway, imho). The sky: It's actually a gradient z yellow to red skysphere, but different because of the dust. I put the skysphere in an .inc file, which I included into Moray. The ... dust? Yes, it's fog! Ground fog, in fact! It has an altitude of 5, which is well above the pyramid! The camera is in fact at 1, well inside the fog ... er, dust. I really thought it wasn't going to work, but it exceeding my expectations. All I wanted was a small layer of dust, but this is what makes the scene look so ... cool. The second saucer: I just duplicated the saucer and the beam, but not the pyramid. This saucer has just started to build the other pyramid. Finally, I added a small cube underneath the camera to make the viewer feel as if he's not so low. It doesn't make a conscious impression, but it does affect the unconscious eye.