TITLE: Phantom of the Orca
NAME: Ray Benjamin
COUNTRY: U.S.
EMAIL: rbenjam2@tampabay.rr.com
WEBPAGE: http://home.tampabay.rr.com/rayshome
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: startrad.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel Draw 8, Corel PhotoPaint 8, PaintShopPro 4

RENDER TIME: 
    just under 7 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-2 350Mhz PC 128M

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The star freighter, "Phantom of the Orca", makes her way past one of the most
spectacular landmarks of the Solar System, Saturn.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

In composing this image I wanted to go for the same kind of feel that you got
from the old 50's science fiction magazine covers.

The most difficult part of this image was the rings.  In all the photos of
Saturn, the rings display a fine structure that's difficult to duplicate with
POV-Ray, especially since I hadn't used the new Media feature until this image.
 I finally used three separate density statements, each with a different
frequency and each with a different density pattern.  I set the frequencies to
prime numbers to eliminate some harmonics that I got the first few renderings. 
I got the distances and albedos from a variety of web sites on Saturn.

There are two rings that aren't shown, since they are so faint, the D ring,
which lies close to the planet, and the E ring, which extends out quite a ways.
 I tried putting them in at first, but they didn't add much and distracted from
other elements of the picture.

All of the moons are included in the model, but only two are visible in this
picture.  Both are in the upper left hand portion of the planet. 
Unfortunately, they are two small to make them out against the background of
the stars.

The planet is textured with an image map that I got from the NASA web site.

The starfield is created with spheres that are colored with random colors.  I
pushed the ambient value up high enough so that they weren't anti-aliased out
of existence.  In order to keep parsing time down, I only placed stars in the
field of view.

The ship is simple enough.  The biggest challenge was in adding enough details
to make it come to life for the viewer.  The additional lights on the ship let
me highlight some of the details which are hard to bring out when dealing with
just a two primary light sources, the sun and the planet.

Lighting was, as usual, very difficult and time consuming to get right.  The
reflected light from the planet is created by using the planet sphere as the
looks_like object for the light source.  This caused the problem that the
planet didn't cast a shadow.  To remedy that, I put an opaque disk inside the
planet and made it normal to the direction to the sun.

I considered having the engines going, but that just detracted from the view of
the rings.

I hope you enjoy it.

P.S. I didn't include the source because I'm too tired to put it all together
right now.  I'll be happy to mail it to anyone who wants it.