EMAIL: sedi@geocities.com
NAME: Darren Izzard (SeDi)
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Night Vision
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/4156
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.02 (Win95)
TOOLS USED: sPatch (for splines),
            LParser (for the trees),
            GForge 1.3 (for the mountains),
            Paint Shop Pro 4 (for heightfield-editing, conversion to JPEG, and
                              adding the title)
RENDER TIME: 3 hours 28 minutes 26.0 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium-133, 10Mb
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A clearly non-photorealistic image, in which a man is shown looking up at
some stars with a telescope on a balcony above a city. He's somewhat surprised
to see the stars smiling back at him, and lowers the telescope from his eye in
disbelief.

Not perhaps the most original interpretation of "Night" - I can't imagine
that mine will be the only "astronomer-with-telescope-looking-at-stars"
submitted - but, on the other hand, I didn't really want to do a nightmare-
style picture.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

A (very) full description is contained in the construction diary ("about.txt")
in the ZIP for this scene. Anyone who's interested can look there for more
info, but here are some brief "what-made-what" details:-

* The astronomer was made entirely using sPatch, including his telescope. To
  avoid unnecessary modelling, I only made the bits you see (i.e. he has no
  face, no legs, no chest, no left arm...). I know there are shadows cast
  inside him - showing through onto his back - because of this, which would be
  easy enough to block out, but I actually think they make his shirt look good!
* The stars' faces were also made in sPatch, but the five-pointed star shapes
  were made out of POV-Ray polygons.
* The starfield in the background is a sky-sphere with a granite texture,
  modified from the "Starfield" texture which comes with POV-Ray (in
  "textures.inc"). The modification makes the starfield brighter, and looks
  much better when anti-aliased.
* The crescent moon is a difference of two spheres. (Admittedly, this is a
  totally inaccurate model!) The craters and "seas" are provided by dents
  and bozo respectively.
* The fractal trees were made using LParser.
* The fractal mountain height field was made using GForge and Paint Shop Pro.
* The town and its lights are made out of relatively simple POV-Ray objects,
  which are randomly positioned using loops and conditionals. The town
  buildings have a roughly circular distribution which bunches in the middle.
* There are two ground fogs (blue and magenta) at different altitudes, which
  are helped in the background by a slight green gradient in the starfield.
* The fence is made of one-unit-wide sections, duplicated in a line. The
  texture is a "sharp-edged" form of bozo, which I hope looks like peeled
  paint on rust.
* The final image was rendered to 800x600, AA=0.3, then converted from TGA to
  JPG. People with more memory should naturally find it renders much quicker.

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