TITLE: Shoemaker Levy 9
NAME: Timothy Hodge
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: timhodge23@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: Sorry, I don't have a web page.
TOPIC: Fire and Ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sl_9.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

Bryce 5

TOOLS USED: 

Bryce 5, Wings3D 0.98.29b

RENDER TIME: 

7 Hr 48 min 19 sec

HARDWARE USED: 

eMac 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 768 MB DDR SDRAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The time is mid July of 1994, Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 is colliding with Jupiter.
Two years earlier the comet passed so close to Jupiter that the giant planet's
gravity tore the comet to bits. By the time it was discovered by astronomers
Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker, and David Levy, it had already been reduced to a
string of fragments. Now the pieces are hurtling back towards Jupiter, this
time on a collision course.
A comet is a lump of ice and dirt, and the clouds of jupiter are made of ice
crystals, but when the one encounters the other at high velocity, the result is
an explosion greater than any bomb and hotter than any furnace.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Before I even started to work on the computer I spent a lot of time reading back
issues of Sky and Telescope magazine, making sketches, and doing other forms of
research. In this picture there are many pict textures, all of which were
either rendered in Bryce, or made using the terrain editor. In addition, almost
everything in this picture is either a terrain object, or a model made using
Wings3D.

Jupiter:
First I made a curved terrain. Then in a separate file, I made just a dim red
square, on top of this I overlaid a number of cylinders in varying shades of
cream color with the fuzzy materials option turned on. I then rendered this and
used it as a pict texture for the curved terrain. For final adjustments, I went
and partially blended the pict texture with the terrain's hight map so that
some of the color bands would be just slightly depressed, I also added a
procedural texture for a bump map.

Clouds:
At this point, Jupiter had nice bands of color but no storms or swirling clouds.
Making the clouds was one of the hardest parts. The clouds are terrain objects
with procedural textures for both color and bump. A modified version of the
hight map is used as an alpha channel for the transparency.

Comet Fragments:
The model for the comet fragments was made in Wings3D. I tried to base them on
pictures of comets that had been photographed by spacecraft. Nobody has ever
seen the inside of a comet so I gave a free rein to my imagination, and, using
procedural textures, made one fragment very icy, while the the other was made
of layers of ice and dust. The gas and dust coming out of the fragments was
made using the same methods as the clouds and the lightening.

Meteors:
The model for the meteors was made in Wings3D and then given a procedural
texture with the additive materials option turned on. I used the randomize
function first to vary their size, and then to scatter them over the surface of
Jupiter

Impact Plumes:
The impact plumes were made in Wings3D and then given variations of the same
procedural texture. For a while I was quite baffled in searching for some way
to make smooth edges for the plume on the upper left. Eventually I settled on a
crude but workable technique, I made multiple copies of the model each one a
little larger and more transparent then the previous.

Blast-wave:
The circular blast-wave around each impact is a terrain object. I first set
hight map to a full white and then applied round edges, then I inverted the
hight map and applied round edges again with greater strength, the result was
used as an an alpha channel.

Lightening:
Lightening on jupiter is no joke, each lightening bolt carries the energy of an
atomic bomb. Spacecraft have seen the flashes on the night side of jupiter. In
a separate file I made four different lightening bolts from a terrain object,
some spheres made a simple background, and several light sources to provide
illumination. These were rendered and placed in the scene as pict objects with
the additive materials option turned on.

Illumination:
I illuminated the scene with a number of light sources. To simulate the light
from Jupiter's moons, I set the sun's color to a dark blueish gray. To simulate
sunlight, I created a very large parallel light and used a specially  textured
square to block off the light from the surface of jupiter while still allowing
it to fall on the comet fragments. Each explosion contains two spherical lights
of slightly different colors.

Render:
The render was vary simple, no fuzzy shadows, no depth of field, no true
ambience, even reflection and refraction were turned off. 
This is my first entry. 
The source file is 22.9 MB and I am afraid that I am unable to include a zip
file