TITLE: Venus Geological Survey
NAME: Paul Bourke
COUNTRY: Venus
EMAIL: pbourke@swin.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/terrain/venus/
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: venus.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    PovRay 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Custom inhouse topology tools

RENDER TIME: 
    4 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dec Alpha

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The surface of the planet (Venus) is reconstructed from topology data collected
initially by the Pioneer orbiter (1978) and later by the Migellan spacecraft
(1990). The resulting topology database consists of height samples over the
entire planet at a resolution of of about 1/22 degrees. The challenge is to
fill in (fractal) large chunks of missing data from the original survey. 
For more details see
   http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/terrain/venus/

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The key is a inhouse utility to extract, massage, and convert the topology data
into a suitable format for PovRay. The standard approaches are used to create
appropiate level-of-detail models since the entire dataset cannot be loaded
into PovRay at the highest resolution. The text/lineart overlay was created
separately and simply placed as a transparent texture on a plane in front of
the camera.