TITLE: Launch of the Sentinel II
NAME: Bob Davis
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: rdavis@rmi.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/gargoyle/34/
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sentinel.jpg
ZIPFILE: sentinel.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    None

RENDER TIME: 
    20m 28s

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII-266

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Set in the polar region of a futuristic world in the midst of planetary war,
a prototype of the Sentinel II Defense Arsenal is launched from a deep water
silo.
The goal - to place a fleet of Sentinels in orbit around key allied planets.  
With an arsenal consisting of particle accelerators and high intensity lasers, 
the Sentinel II should prove an effective obstacle against surprise attacks.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The Sentinel II, fighters, cruisers, and towers are all CSG's comprised of
very simple shapes (ie. spheres, tori, cylinders, cones, etc.).  The fighters
use a few "stretched" spheres, while the Sentinel and the cruisers use a number
of #while loops to create tori series and fixed cylinder translation
differences.
I actually applied a somewhat intricate bump map to the cruisers, but you
cannot
see it because of the scale. The hydrogen thrust "vapor trails" on the ships are

made up of halos.  The one from the Sentinel uses a very high turbulence
factor.

The planet is a sphere with an image map of saturn while the rings are made up
of
a series of discs. The water is a plane using an agate normal. Directly beneath

the water is another plane with a bozo pattern and a yellow/green color map.

The sky is a hollow sphere with a bozo pattern and a color map to give the
clouds a stormy look.  I didn't use a sky sphere because I wanted the clouds
to partially obscure the planet. The lightning was created using Jeff Brickley's

include file.

The ice in the background is simply a png height field I generated in Povray.

I had originally created a few very simple human figures to place around the
silo platform.  But when I scaled them to the Sentinel, they looked like tiny
splotches on a canvas.  Needless to say, I removed them from the image.