EMAIL: cfusner@enter.net NAME: Charles Fusner TOPIC: Science Fiction COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.0 TOOLS USED: MS-DOS Edit, mostly. Plus a little Paint Shop Pro for the image_maps and bump maps. And of course HF-LAB for the ground. (NO modeller this time around). RENDER TIME: Approx. 40 some odd hours. ** (see below, though) HARDWARE USED: 386/387 for construction and some rendering, 486DX-66 for the remainder of the rendering ** (see below) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Sitting lonely vigil upon the hills of southern Helionus, Martigan Dhantaki chanced to look down amidst the autumn leaves and saw a curious artifact which looked like nothing that his world had ever seen before..." This image depicts what he saw, showing the artifact's slightly battered looking alien strangeness juxtaposed with the familiar sight of autumn leaves (so familiar to this time of year here in my little corner of the Earth). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The origin of this picture was in a quick illustration I made for my roleplayers' club's current storyline. The initial version of this object was extremely rough, having been hashed out in just four hours, and looking like nothing more "alien" than a common calculator. First I used HF-LAB to construct a simple bit of fractally jagged landscape on which the object was to rest, and did several test renders until the object looked like it was sitting on the resultant height_field without sinking into it :> Later I gave the landscape h_f a kind of "salt- and-pepper granite" texture. Next, I aligned the object with an orthographic camera and set the up & right vectors so that it completely filled the screen. This produce the basic source for an image map, to whose buttons I added the alien alphabet in PSP. Then, taking it back to the original image, I union'ed all the keys and applied that image map to the union as a whole, managing to put the writing on all keys at once. It was also more or less at this point that I decided to throw a touch of iridescence into the artifact's display panel. The hardest part was the leaves. I went through five failed attempts to make a halfway realistic leaf before finally falling back on bicubic patches as an old reliable standby. The final leaves consist of five bezier patches, initally fashioned flat so that once again an orthographic camera could produce a silhouette image as a source for the bump_map of the veins which were then added to the source in PSP once more, and then bump_mapped onto the leaf surface. Once the bump map was in place, I just hand tweaked the edges of the patches up to give it some natural curling. I'm still not 100% happy with them, but since they ate up a week and a half of test renders, I had to stop being a perfectionist or miss the IRTC deadline! I started to render this whole thing on a 386-16, but since my final piece involved antialiasing and an area light, I had to borrow the use of a 486DX66 to finish in time for the competition.