TITLE: Orion VII @ MZ4 (orion7.jpg)
NAME: Jens Dengler
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: jd@surveyor.in-berlin.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.in-berlin.de/User/jd/
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: orion7.jpg
ZIPFILE: orion7.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.01.Linux.gcc

TOOLS USED: 
    The GIMP 1.0 (Moon Surface Creation) XV3.10a (TGA-JPEG)

RENDER TIME: 
    0 hours 43 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    i586/133

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Orion VII at MZ4
================
"Was heute noch wie ein Maerchen klingt, kann morgen schon
Wirklichkeit sein. Hier ist ein Maerchen von Uebermorgen..."

For "First Encounter" I found myself fiddling around with a disc shaped
space ship and I remembered the past and one of my favoured German TV
short series "Raumpatrouille Orion" (Space Patrol Orion) of 1966. The image
is about the first encounter of humans and the "frogs" - when the fast
cruiser Orion VII and half of its crew finds itself repelled from the
Moon MZ4 many hundreds of parsecs away from Earth by a fleet of fast and
powerful alien space ships, while the engineer and the astrogator were
stranded within the invaded station on the moon.

It was one of the best first encounter I had ever seen, because the scenes
in the moon station with its strange doors and empty corridors were really
exciting. The aliens were surviving in vacuum and were immune against
energy weapons, while an explosion of an oxygene container were killing
them at the end.

The series was only in black and white, so the colors of the Orion VII
are only imaginary. After seeing the series with the age of about 7 or 8
I was drawing some comics of it, so I know the shape of the Orion still
very well. I can tell that the rendered model is not exactly as the
original, but I wanted to make it a bit more interesting by carving these
sections out of the flat cones. I also couldn't resist to make it as
metallic as possible. The shape of the alien ships is a bit questionable,
too. I think on TV they had the shape I rendered, but at the pocket book
covers of the series they have a sphere for the central body and no front
thorn so that they are looking much like Sputniks.

One aspect of the SF TV series was its somewhat thrashy outfit, for
instance they used flat-irons for the controls within the space ship, the
1:1 size landing ship models were audible out of chip wood and plastics.
But as a 7-year-old I didn't noticed that at all. I was amazed by the
undersea space base, by the burning planet falling to Earth, by the
frightening robots... The series really might have the potential to be
resurrected. If someone is looking for a CGI engineer for the VR takes
of it - I'm currently free! ;-)

IMAGE HISTORY:
The history of this image is somewhat short. Some side steps of it were
the use of the Earth surface on the moon sphere, which looked really cool
but which was also fast pixilating when coming near. The making of the
MZ4 surface was simply twiddling with the filters of GIMP. The starry
background is not that satisfying, although I had modified one of the standard
starfield definitions. But it still dies with the antialializing. On the
other hand the surfaces of the space ships and the moon need antialializing
and to use a second texture map needs a *real big* map for filling
the whole sky. It would help to select the sky and to increase the
contrast, but as I understand the IRTC rules, this is not allowed. (It is
very similar to adding lens flare within post processing.) Also using
a flat plane behind the scene with some flashy nebula would have been
cheap in my eyes. For all these reasons I have added a few halos as stars
by try and error to the view. The halo around the true light source you
can see within one of the Orion fins.

I had also tried to use real light sources in transparent objects for
the red antigravity areas of the disc ship, but for speed nothing beats
an ambient near 1. So the image has probably its drawbacks. Its submitted
for the Olympic idea.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Creation of the moon surface:
gimp 
     onImage -> Filter -> Noise -> Noisify...
     onImage -> Filter -> Enhance -> Despecle...
     onImage -> CircleSelect -> Border n -> Feather m -> ... cutSelection
     ...
     onImage -> Filter -> Noise -> Noisify...
     onImage -> Filter -> Enhance -> Despecle...
     onImage -> ... -> Emboss
     onImage -> Image -> Colors -> Curves...
     onImage -> Save As somecrater.gif
(Ok, I have seen that with the demos of povray there comes a method to
create crater on a two stage rendering with light and noise and heightfield,
but this was a bit too complex for my simple mind. Also I still had the
problem to add mountains and surface cracks, then. Maybe next time. For the
ZIP I had added the used GIF, but probably it is easy to create a better
surface on ones own.)

Creation of the scene:
vim...

Creation of the image:
povray -i orion7.pov +w800 +h600 +a0.2
xv -8 orion7.tga
     Save As JPEG orion7.jpg (96%)

               -- jd --