EMAIL: gt2832b@prism.gatech.edu
NAME: Joshua Brian Humphries
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.0 for DOS and Imagine 3.0
TOOLS USED: Adobe Photoshop 2.5, FractInt 19.2, SVGA Image Processor 3.0
RENDER TIME: about 1 hour
HARDWARE USED: 486DX4-120Mhz, 16MB RAM, Win95
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
        This image is a Lunar Airforce Transport (not that there is any air
over which a force must preside but spaceforce sounded too generic) flying
over the surface of the moon with the sun in the sky and the Earth just
setting.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
        The earth image map was included with 3D-Studio v2.0 (which I used to
have and kept all the nifty maps it came with - if that can get me in
legal trouble than... I was just kidding ;)
        To create a height-map for the moon's surface, I created an image
using photoshop of a bunch of random placed and random size rings. Then I
applied a thick gaussian blur. I then blended these rings with a plasma
cloud generated with FractInt 19.2. This created the final, almost cratered
look to the height-map.
        I used the above map as a height_field in pov-ray, and the earth map
mentioned above to make the background scene (everything minus the transport).
I added a bozo (cloud) sphere around the earth to improve the realism (or
attempt anyways).
        The starfield background was created by making a plasma cloud with
FractInt and a starfield with FractInt. I then added a black->violet gradient
palette file to the plasma and then used SVGA Image Processor (a simple DOS
util I wrote last summer) to interpolate the two to get a starfield with that
nifty nebula cloud effect.
        Through painful calculations (not THAT painful but...) I mapped it on a
plane in the POV scene such that it would map perfectly from corner to corner
of the final image (as if it were a real backdrop image).
        After rendering that (about 40 minutes), I used it as the backdrop
for an Imagine rendering (because POV is MUCH better at landscapes but image-
mapping and modeling are better with Imagine). All image maps for the transport
were created with photoshop. Imagine was setup for Tracing - not Scanline - so
this image WAS raytraced.
        The final Imagine rendering took about another 30 minutes or maybe
a tad longer (I don't remember exactly but it wasn't long).
        This is the just the first of what I hope to be numerous entries into
this months competition because sci-fi is one of my favorite topics to render.
        There may not be an accompanying jhmoon.zip for a while as it is
big (lots of big, tough-to-compress image-maps) and my net connection is
over a 14.4 and the host can only receive via Kermit (and the
implementation is so lousy that I get about 2400 baud with it - :(