EMAIL: Tha.AMPro@pegasuz.com NAME: Alex Mead TOPIC: Science Fiction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: Povray 2.2 (Hey, that's what was available to me) TOOLS USED: PowerPOV for pov script generation RENDER TIME: 25 minutes 7 seconds HARDWARE USED: 486/66 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: an AMProBot DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Hmmm, where to begin. Since PovRAY 2.2 has been all I've had at my disposal for eons, I've been writing a POV script generator for PowerBASIC called PowerPOV. It makes it a lot easier to render thousands of objects using PovRAY 2.2 (I know, I know, just in the nick of time eh?) But anyway that's all it took, one rougly 600 line PowerBASIC program and my PowerPOV library. PowerPOV assembled the roughly 2500 lines of POV script and about 30 minutes later, there it was. EXTRA STUFF THAT YOU PROBABLY DON'T WANT TO KNOW I swore to myself that I wouldn't ever become a Web Browser. I've seen many a netscape addict on campus at 3am unable to go home, but considering that I needed to check out my web page, I was left with little choice. When I got to the part where I had to decide what links to add to my page, I figured I'd just check out a few to see if I want to include them or not. Anyway, as a 2 to 3 year veteran of PovRAY I figured I'd check out the page and add the link. Well, see then there was this Internet Ray Tracing competition thing, and the topic was--get this-- science fiction. Obviosly a sign that whoever runs this competition wanted me to enter something. I mean I only Ray trace science fiction stuff every day of my life. Hi, my name's Alex Mead. I make this magazine called the AMProGram which features comic book art that I write and illustrate, and is about characters from the video games I make, and well, you guessed it, the backgrounds in my magazine are raytraced. Yes this is all very time consuming so I didn't have a lot of time to write pov script files and that's why I wrote PowerPOV. In case you're wondering, the mixture of my comic art and my pov backgrounds is pretty good and can be seen at http://www.pegasuz.com/ampro. Unfortunately the exact pov script I used to render this image was mistakenly deleted, but I've included most of the component files and that's basically all you really need to tinker around in my image. I would really love visitors to my web page, and especially EMail from other ray-tracing fans, especially suggestions and comments. I will be downloading Povray 3.0 as soon as I find a time when I don't get that "The PovRay FTP server is busy, do not disturb it little man." message and I would appreciate any tips and help on how it can make my life easier. I've read some of the docs that I could find on it, a whole bunch of it makes a lot of PowerPOV obsolete. Like rotating things through three dimentions (had to track down and talk to big time mathemetitions to get that stuff, and now it's all done for me, erg (ah, but I digest)). PS: I talk a lot when it's late in the morning and I havn't been to bed yet. I bet you needed me to tell you that. This message has been brought to you by the letters "P", "V", the number "2", and the subliminal message "Please check out my web page http://www. pegasuz.com/ampro".