EMAIL: rclee@oklahoma.net NAME: Robert Lee TOPIC: Future COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Europa's Children COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: POV 3.5 TOOLS USED: IFranView, Little Gray Cells, BioWin, make grass. RENDER TIME: about 1 day 4 hours HARDWARE USED: 1.7 Ghz Pentium laptop with Windows XP IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In the future, life will be discovered on Jupiter's moon Europa. After a trip through interplanetery space, a delivery probe (upper left) will penetrate Europa's icy surface and release a camera probe (center) into the subsurface ocean. Heat, generated within the moon from Jupiter's gravitational forces, allows life to flourish. Jellyfish-like creatures float within a a current of small bubbles. Two plant-like stalks can be seen in the middle-left. A shelled creature sits on the sea floor on the bottom left. The delivery and camera probes are based on actual NASA designs. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Thanks to Gilles Tran for his Makegrass macro. Thanks to Justin Smith for his code to make mountains. I modified the code quit a bit; but, it was the basis of one of the isosurfaces. The picture was rendered with +w1024 +h768. To reduce jaggies, +aa 0.3 was used. Many tests were made with radiosity; however, the picture looked better without it. The ground is made up of two isosurfaces: Justin Smith's mountain code plus an isosurface I used in another picture. The Europan life formes were generated using Biowin. Each life form was textured to look as authentic as possible. There is one large area light in the middle of the scene just below the icy surface and a dim, shadowless light to fill in the foreground. A white sky sphere is also used above the icy ceiling. A watery media was added to make the scene look like it was underwater. The media fills the volume of the scene. I created the picture with conditional switches so different parts of the scene could be rendered with simple or complex textures, simple or complex lighting, etc. This technique helped to speed up development. I left the conditional statements in the code so others can see how this is done. Code for the grass mesh and biowin life forms are stored in separate include files. IfranView was used to convert the PNG files to JPG.