TITLE: Moon/Sun
NAME: Benoit Kloeckner
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: benoit.kloeckner@free.fr
WEBPAGE: piqueselle.free.fr

TOPIC: Opposites
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sunmoon1.jpg
ZIPFILE: sunmoon1.zip
RENDERER USED: 

  povray 3.6


TOOLS USED: 

  The Gimp v2.0
  

RENDER TIME: 

  1 hour 47 minutes


HARDWARE USED: 

  Pentium 4, 2 GHz, RAM 384 Mo

  

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Moon/Sun. Night/Day. Cold reflecting rock/Hot ball of plasma.

I had a hard time finding an idea I feel able to go through. My first 
attempt was an eclipse, but I preferred to separate the moon and the sun,
to place them on opposites sides of the image to emphasize the topic.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


For the moon I used an image map (many thanks to James Hastings-Trew, who 
gives free access to high-quality planet images at 
http://gw.marketingden.com/planets/news.html). As the result was too sharp,
I used the gimp to blur the image map. The lightning was difficult to set up,
I end up using plain ambient illumination and no light source. An emission 
media gives the not-so-realistic-but-romantic halo.
  The sun is an emission media. I reused the density function I wrote for
the left over eclipse, namely a "sphericalised" dent pattern.
  The background is a plane with gradient pigment. In the first version of the 
image I used blue on the left and yellow on the right, but it was not good
(the sun was melting with the background, and anyway the background alone
was awfull) so I switched to dark/light blue.
  The hardest part was, unsurprisingly, the clouds. I used emission and
scattering media in a box. It took some time before I get a convincing shape.
The density uses a bump pattern and, in front of the moon, a black hole warp.