EMAIL: bobfranke@halcyon.com NAME: Bob Franke TOPIC: First Encounter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: First Encounter COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.halcyon.com/wordsltd/pov/pov.htm RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1a (Windows 95) TOOLS USED: POV-Ray editor Ronald L. Parker's TorusSpline macro Chris Colefax's Coil Generator John P. Beale's Height Field Lab (HF-Lab) Photostyler for jpeg conversion RENDER TIME: 19 hours 47 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133 w/ 128 Mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: First encounter... our surveyor robot meets theirs. This scene takes place about 150 years in the future, 67 light years away, on a moon in the star system HD210277. This is a Sun-like star slightly larger than our Sun with a Jupiter sized planet, in an orbit slightly larger that the Earth's. Although life is not expected on this large gas planet, life may be possible on one of its moons. This is the first extra-solar search for life by I-Seti. Although the moon is lifeless, the search has achieved an unexpected success. Our simple robot has encountered a highly advanced surveyor robot from an unknown star system. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The earth robot is based on the very successful Mars Sojourner with the articulating bogie suspension, capable of traversing very large rocks. The earthbot is equipped with two 3D cameras and an arm with sensor arrays in the fingers of the gripper. The earthbot is made with simple CSG methods. The wiring, to the motors inside the wheels, was done with Ronald Parker's TorusSpline macro. Chris Colefax's Coil Generator was used for the electrical wiring up to the ccd cameras on the InputTower. The alien robot is a sphere surrounded with three force fields. These fields provide both movement and sensory perception. The alienbot is made with CSG and three torii with media interior. The landscape is made with three height fields, created with HF-Lab. A macro was used to create the rocks by combining a bunch of random boxes and spheres. The sky is a sky_sphere and a large inner sphere with a simple cloud texture. The highly toxic atmosphere is a ground fog. The mother planet is a sphere with several disks for the rings and is located between the two "sky" spheres. The planet uses a black and white texture and is made fairly transparent to give the illusion of distance. To save space, the files for the height fields are not included with the source code. Well that's about it. I hope you like the image.