EMAIL: pegzel@hooked.net

NAME: Sam D Zilboorg

TOPIC: Science Fiction

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

RENDERER USED: LightWave 3D 5.0

TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop and Kai's Power Tools for image maps

RENDER TIME: 1h 22m 34s

HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium 166 16m

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image represents a small squad of ships
haveing just arived through a Babylon 5(tm) style jumpgate and beginning 
an attack run.  Meeting heavy resistance.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The model of the gate and vortex
were downloaded from ftp.newtek.com and then coppied as somewhat of a
tutorial/personal trainer.  The ships were modeled useing Lightwave's B-Spline
MetaNurb(tm) feature.  Once the ships were built I began to piece the scene
together, the ship model was loaded once, cloaned, and moved to there final
positions.  The destroyed ship is the same model just torn apart and rotated
into an interesting position.  The explosion its self its a collection of
2000 single-point polygons with a heavy glow and luminosity.  Lighting this
scene was very tricky, I used a total of 18 lights to get the desired effect.
1 distant light with a pure white color used to simulate the ambience of a sun
without casting any shadows.  A much duller, blue spotlight was used to cast
the
major shadows of the scene and give a nice edge to all objects.  Next the
smaller
lights were added and parented to null objects in straight paths to get the
look
of heavy weapons fire.  All of the weapons lights were given a soft flare to
render
them visible.  2 more flares were added for the opening of the jumpgate, and
one
to add heat to the explosion.  I added a very light fractal bump map to all
surfaces
to give a somewhat weathered look, combined with pannel diffuse maps, I got a
very
"spacey" looking set of surfaces.  The final picture was rendered with pure ray
traced
shadows, reflections, and refractions.  NO SHADOW MAPS USED!