EMAIL: olm@sprynet.com NAME: Dave Hamilton TOPIC: First Encounter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Man & Machine Meet the Supersonic Age COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: www.traces.org RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.1 TOOLS USED: sPatch, DeLuxe Paint, PhotoShop RENDER TIME: 24 hours 43 minutes HARDWARE USED: PC/Pentium 200mHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: On a cloudless October morning in 1947, high above the Mojave Desert, USAF Captain Charles "Chuck" Yeager, and the experimental Bell X-1 rocket plane, met the sound barrier for the first time. The image depicts the point in the flight were the barrier shockwaves are just beginning to form at the nose of the aircraft. The model did not seem complete without a pilot, so he's in there. He is just barely visible under the canopy, but any resemblance to Chuck Yeager is purely coincidental. Although not apparent in this scene, the model sports movable ailerons, flaps and rudder. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The entire aircraft, including the canopy framing and pitot tubes, is composed of Bezier patch objects generated using Mike Clifton's sPatch. The basic patch objects were exported to POV-Ray for CSG and rendering. The rocket exhaust and shockwaves were created with POV primitives using media. The background is a sky sphere with a 'y' gradient and an appropriate color map. The image caption and copyright notice are POV text objects. All image map graphics are my own original artwork created using Electronic Arts DeLuxe Paint and Adobe PhotoShop. The .pov file is extensively annotated for those interested in further details on the scene's construction. Other than graphic format conversion from POV-Ray .tga output to .jpg, there was no post-processing of the image.