TITLE: A Millennial Encounter
NAME: David Nash
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: dnash@umich.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dnash/3dgraphics/index.html
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: newvenus.jpg
ZIPFILE: newvenus.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.00, unofficial SGI Irix compilation

TOOLS USED: 
    Orb 0.2b (by John Beale, http://www.best.com/~beale)
            xv 3.10a (for converting logo.tga to GIF)
            xpaint 2.1.1 (for lines.gif)
            Adobe Illustrator 7.01 (for signature and conversion to JPEG)

RENDER TIME: 
    10 hr. 15 min.

HARDWARE USED: 
    SGI Octane, Irix 6.5, 175 MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


At the very end of the first millenium of human missions to other worlds, a new
world opens up...

As the _Aphrodite_  approaches the newly terraformed Venus -- long occupied
only by scientists and terraforming engineers -- anyone in the second-class
lounge gets a good view.  The _Aphrodite_, modified from earlier ships in the
Earth-Mars tourist trade, is one of three ships purchased by Ishtar Lines for
the new Earth-Venus run, and is the first ship to Venus open to members of the
public.  


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Venus:  I had already created a terraformed Venus using Orb (a free utility by
John Beale that approximates a heightfield "wrapped around a sphere" with a
triangle mesh). 

Orb handles spherical heightfields the same way POV-Ray handles planar ones: 
it takes a bitmapped image and converts the colors or color indices into
elevation data.  For this scene, I used a topographic map (venusmap.gif: 
courtesy NASA/JPL/Caltech) of Venus, based on Pioneer Venus Orbiter altimetry
data.  (I wanted Magellan data, but the maps I found were colored too strangely
to be useful as a heightfield maker...) 

I realized, while playing around with this Venus image, that a pretty good idea
for "first encounter" lurked within, so I improved the appearance of Venus
(more realistic clouds and atmosphere) and added the lounge.

With one small exception (the image map lines.gif, used to color the score
pad), I did everything in the lounge entirely with POV-Ray:

Walls, furniture, telescope, drinks:  Good ol' CSG operations...

Star field:  I found the conventional starfield patterns included with POV-Ray
(typically "granite" with small regions of white or colored spots) looked odd,
so I created my own starfield from a large group of self-luminous spheres. 
This seems to give a better range of star brightnesses (though it takes some
tweaking to make sure that really big stars -- which look like disks rather
than stars -- don't show up).

Scrabble game:  Probably the most involved part of the scene.  The colors of
the special squares don't follow a nice checkerboard pattern, so I had to
create them one by one.   Fortunately, the board has 4-fold rotational symmetry
around the center, so all I needed to do was make 1/4 of the board and rotate
that into appropriate places.  The tiles are wood-textured boxes with letter
"stamped" into them with CSG difference.

Score pad and pencil:  the spiral binding of the score pad used the output from
spring.inc, a utility I wrote to create smooth helices with a circular or
elliptical cross section.

Poster for Ishtar Lines:  Produced by the separate scene file logo.pov.  The
two planets are simpler than the "spherical heightfield" Venus in the window: 
just flat maps wrapped around a sphere.  I got the map of Earth (earthmap.gif)
from Constantine Thomas's planetary image map site:
(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/thomasc1/render/planets/earth.htm).  I
prepared the flat map of Venus by using POV-Ray's regular height field
generator with venusmap.gif.  I combined the heightfield with a dark blue plane
representing the water, set the combination to ambient 1 so it would be
self-luminous and unshadowed, and rendered it in POV-Ray.  I then cropped off
the background edges and converted it to GIF so I could use it as an image map.

Files:

logo.pov:  Ishtar Lines poster
newvenus.pov:  Main POV scene file
ventopo.pov:  Creates regular heightfield of Venus (for poster)

earthmap.gif:  Earth map for Ishtar Lines poster
lines.gif:  image map for score pad (blue lines on yellow background)
logo.gif:  output of logo.pov (poster)
venusmap.gif:  color-coded topographic map of Venus
ventopo.gif:  output of ventopo.pov, for Ishtar Lines poster
 
include/dpnstars.inc:  Star field
include/dpntxtr.inc: Custom textures
include/game.inc:  Scrabble game and accessories
include/lights.inc: Light sources for main scene
include/rack.inc: Scrabble racks
include/scrbrd2.inc: Scrabble board
include/scrbtile.inc: Scrabble tiles
include/spring.inc:  Spring maker
include/venus.inc:  Venus itself

The spherical heightfield (venusorb.inc) is *HUGE* (over 13 MB), and I've
decided not to include it in the .zip file -- it would make the file more than
twice as large as any other .zip file I've seen from the IRTC.  Nonetheless
it's a key part of the scene.  I will put a compressed version on my web site
(at the URL in the header) once the "First Encounter" voting begins.