TITLE: Halfway House NAME: Peter Clarke COUNTRY: England EMAIL: peter-clarke@dial.pipex.com WEBPAGE: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/peter-clarke TOPIC: Landmarks COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pbcspace.jpg ZIPFILE: pbcspace.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Corel Photo Paint (for background image of stars) RENDER TIME: 2 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: More of a spacemark than a landmark. This space station, loosely based on the one in the film "2001", does not orbit the Earth but lies at the edge of the Solar System and acts as a travel inn for those brave people on their way to the stars. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image consists of two main objects and a background. Nothing clever went into the spacestation or flying saucer, but much use was made of metallic textures. The spacestation is new, but I thought it would be nice to add a flying saucer that I created some time ago to the scene. The background consists of an image map (photo of stars) placed onto a very large box and took me a long time to get right. First I tried mapping the stars photo onto a sky_sphere but the result was awful. Mapping the stars onto a distant large box caused problems with lights and shadows. These problems were only solved by removing some lights from the scene and carefully positioning the others. To keep the resolution of the stars I used a large image. A lot of the render time was due to the background image. I would be interested to know of a better way of creating a background using an image map. The stars photo is not included in the zip file.