TITLE: Interplanetary Journey
NAME: Murtaza Amin
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: murtaza001@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Journey
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: home.mpg
ZIPFILE: home.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Polyray 1.8

TOOLS USED: 
    paint (for drawing spherical height map picture), Irfanview (for
modifying spherical height map picture)

CREATION TIME: 
    ~8 hours computer time (Most of the time on frames containing the
asteroid, rest was much quicker).

HARDWARE USED: 
    Split the work between AMD 1.2GHz laptop and AMD 1.533GHz
desktop

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION: 

A journey from a mining operation to home.  The spaceship kind of reminds me of
my car:  Red, not the best paint job, but runs like a champ.

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: 

As is.  I am a little disappointed with the .mpg conversion, but I can't
complain since everyone is subject to it.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED: 


I made extensive use of noise functions for the textures.  These are all
available in the attached .zip file.  Note that the height map file
"untitled.jpg" I used for my asteroid was originally a .bmp.  I'm not sure if
polyray accepts .jpg's, so you probably have to convert it back to .bmp.  I
don't know how the conversion will affect the surface, but it will probably
introduce unwanted artifacts.  These can be smoothed away hopefully.

Spaceship:
Beziers and stretched spheres.  The burn marks are from a scaled noise
function.

Starfield:
Large "sky sphere" around the whole scene.  The texture of the sphere is a sum
of a few noise functions on various scales.

Ringed Planet:
Recycled from an earlier submission of mine.  The ring and surface textures are
scaled noise functions.

Earthlike Planet:
Sphere with (you guessed it) some noise functions.

Asteroid:
Spherical height map from the file "untitled.bmp".  The file was too big to
include in my source, so I included a .jpg of it.  You'll have to convert it
back to a .bmp to use it.

All textures and objects were created by me.

