TITLE: Plattform
NAME: Christoph Ohsenbr_gge
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: AlaskaS@gmx.de
WEBPAGE: -
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: coplattf.jpg
ZIPFILE: coplattf.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    none

RENDER TIME: 
    13 30 h

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Centrino 1,5 Ghz, 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


First I wanted to do a classic desert panorama. Some rocks in the background,
sand on the floor, a skeleton and some dead 
trees. But I didn't really have fun to design that stuff. It wasn't really my
thing. So I went over to my final image:
It is a artificial little spot of desert in space.
In the middle there is a portal through which we can see water. It was a little
bit inspired by the 'World of tiers' written
by Philip Jose Farmer. 
It respresents a 'dead end' in a chain of portals. Perhaps designed as a prison
if the portal can only be used in one 
direction.
The border between the atmosphere on the platform against the emptiness of space
is a dome made of energy. An artificial 
sun at the zenith supports the landscape with light and warmth.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The whole scene is written in POVs SDL without usage of any other tools or
scripts.
I've done it that way, because I don't have Poser or 3DSmax and I didn't want to
use Moray or similar tools. I like the 
mathematical exactness of objects written in pure SDL :)

After all this is my first really completed image. I've been playing around with
POV for about half an year but never
really finished a whole scene. I would really be happy to get lots of comments
and critique.

So... The sand on the platform is a single blob object, the components are
translatet in y-direction by 2 sin-curves and 
a little randomness. 

The space background is created with inspiration by Chris Colefax phantastic
galaxy include files. I didn't directly include 
them but used the same patterns and so on ;)

The palms an the grass were created with a macro I created earlier to do bambus
and grass.

The pillars of the portals are simply two spheresweeps, the stairs are
sperellipsoids.

The water seen through the portal is not simply a plain with texture, but it's a
room behind it. The walls of this room 
are rotated so that they are hidden by the pillars.
The little colorfull effects around the portal are simple spheres filled with
emitting media. This image was the first time 
I tried to use media.

The artificial sun is also made with emittive media.

At last there are the spheresweeps with thorns. 

So that's it. There are no complex structures or textures in this scene and it
is not intended to look realistic :)

I apologize for the two black spots at the portal. They would disappear with
higher trace level I think. But I didn't want 
to wait another 13:30 h to get an image without those two spots.