TITLE: Battle for the planet
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmspace.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmspace.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 

    POV-Ray's built-in editor.
    Sketches on paper.
    And Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG.

RENDER TIME: 

Time For Parse:    0 hours  1 minutes   1.0 seconds (61 seconds)
Time For Trace:    6 hours 53 minutes  47.0 seconds (24827 seconds)
    Total Time:    6 hours 54 minutes  48.0 seconds (24888 seconds)
(using basic anti-aliasing values)

HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    The defenders' ships fight bravely against the invasion forces.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

After the number of include files I needed last round, I decided to be more
minimalist this time.  So, there's a small .pov file, the standard includes
and the pdmspace.inc file which contains all the macros etc for this scene.

I didn't use any imagemaps, so I didn't need to include them in the .zip
file.

It seems to be almost compulsory to do a scene with spacecraft at least
once in the IRTC - or at least, it's a cliche :-) .  So I defined three
different sizes of flying saucer to build up a fleet, and then made the
bristling purple spaceship, and then the old-style rocketships.  Finally,
I added some randomised blob objects meant to represent asteroids, and
some small objects for debris.  Other blobs were used with media to
create the explosions.

Then a few loops were used to fill space with the different types of
objects, and one of each was placed nearer the camera to make it more
visible.

The planet is basically a big sphere. A very big sphere. And there's an even
bigger sphere wrapped round it to be the atmosphere.

The planet has a texture of blue and green to represent land and sea, with
another texture (gradient) overlaid on that to represent the ice caps.  It
was revised with ideas taken from an email by David Morgan-Mar.

The atmosphere is basically a transparent blue texture with an opaque
cloud texture; then filled with a media based on an old post to
comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing by Stephan Ahonen.

The lighting was set up, so the planet has a day and a night side.
I tried to sprinkle lit areas across the planet, so they'd show up on the
night side, but that didn't work too well.

The stars were set up with brightnesses greater than 1, so that they'd
still be visible after anti-aliasing.  I think that idea came from an old
c.g.r.r post too.

The textures on the spaceships look better in close-ups of the different
spaceships.  The debris objects are apparently in the scene, from a look
in the .debug file it creates, but they're too small to be visible.