TIKIDOG.JPG
B.J. Mares
bjmares@teleport.com
Made in POV-Ray

This is my entry for "Alien Worlds."  It features my dog Tiki.  He is a golden retriever.  
He has an internet home page at http://www.teleport.com/~bjmares/tiki.html.
For the "TIKI" text I used the characters from chars.inc and made them jade for the base.
For the electricity effect, I used a gradient pattern and a color map that was mostly 
transparent but had some blue and white.  To make the earth, I projected the earth picture 
onto a sphere.  For the land, I scribbled on a piece of paper to make it dark.  I then used 
an eraser to make some parts lighter.  I scanned that in and smoothed it and used it as a 
height field.  Tiki is not actually a 3-D object.  He is just projected onto a 2-D surface.  
To make the outside of the Tiki image transparent, I had to remove the background and 
put a solid color in.  I made Tiki a height field and cropped out the unwanted portion of 
the picture with the water_level command and then scaled the depth to near zero to give 
a flat surface.

My universe background is cygnus_1.jpg from Jerry's Astronomy page at 
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/union/susoc/cass/homes/me/me931599/jgh.html.  The earth 
image is from ftp://ftp.univ-rennes1.fr/pub/Images/ASTRO/space/earthx.gif.