TITLE: The Sentinel NAME: Tekno Frannansa COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com WEBPAGE: http://www.evilsuperbrain.com TOPIC: Loneliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: sentinel.jpg ZIPFILE: sentinel.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows v3.5 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray editor Paint Shop Pro 5&6 RENDER TIME: approx. 20 hours total (image rendered in several parts) HARDWARE USED: PentiumIII 550MHz 256MB RAM PentiumIV 2GHz 512MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This somewhat surreal picture shows a lonely figure stood on an alien world, with other barren worlds visible beyond. This image was inspired by an abstract painting by my Mum. She's been an abstract painter for a long time now, and her image "the sentinel" has been one of my favourites for many years, so when I saw this topic that image immediately came to mind. On the pov newsgroups hughes b summed it up well as "A sort of organic versus inorganic matter on a orb like the others in space amid some lifegiving light." :) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This started out as a simple effort in visualising my interpretation of my mum's original painting. The first version was knocked together in just a couple of hours, and consisted of the 3 planets, with atmospheres, and a julia fractal as a placeholder for the figure. The final scene had a lot of work put into refining it, so I'll cover the main bits: The atmosphere: This is a media using a function to describe it's density. Originally it was a simple scattering media, and the density was exponential (which I think is correct). In the final image the density is modified by a granite pigment, and the atmosphere is now a type 5 media, which behaves partly like a simple scattering media, but also gets a really nice glow around the sun. A similar media is used on the other planets in the background. The figure: This was an attempt to get a surreal impression of a human-like figure wrapped in a shroud. I contructed it from simple CSG and a few julia fractals. I rendered a catalogue of 256 images of fractals with different parameters, so that I could choose the ones I needed to construct the figure. The rocks: These are notable for being the only thing that's been added to the scene after the first WIP! They're just intersections of 3 randomly rotated cubes, randomly positioned and scaled, and with a simple agate pigment. I added them because they "felt right", though I realise now that they work because they contrast with the smooth curves of the figure, adding to the loneliness of the piece. And finally, I'd just like to explain the rendering of the final image: The image has been compiled from 4 seperate renders. This is solely to spread rendering load and to avoid using expensive blur settings on the whole image. The final image is how it will look if you render the source provided. I also resized the image to be 20% bigger because it was a little too small for my liking but I don't have time to render a bigger version. I hope you like it. Keep an eye on my website to see some work in progress images from this scene sometime soon.