TITLE: Distant Voyager
NAME: David Ray
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: davidray@ozemail.com.au
WEBPAGE: None
TOPIC: First Encounters
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: distvoy.jpg
ZIPFILE: distvoy.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows v3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro for conversion to JPG.

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 44 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    486dx2/66 20MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In 1977 Voyager 2 was launched from Earth on a mission to visit 
the outer planets from which masses of information was received 
greatly increasing our understanding of our solar system.  Once 
it's mission was complete Voyager 2 headed out beyond the solar
system into deep space never to return.  Drifting for centuries 
beyond mankind's existence, it's internal power systems long 
since diminished, Voyager 2 stumbles into the trade routes of a
peaceful alien civilisation.  An alien ship, travelling on a beam 
of blue/white particles, detects Voyager 2 and dispatches a probe 
to investigate.  This image is a snapshot of the probes initial 
scan.  This moment is the alien civilisation's first encounter 
with anything not from it's world and this moment is destined, in
time, to destroy their entire civilisation...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Goals : 
I had a couple of goals in mind at the beginning aimed at increasing 
my knowledge of POV-Ray's language (this is only my third scene hand 
coded and only my fourth scene ever - one using Moray).  My goals 
were to not use any modelling tools whatsoever except POV-Ray for 
Windows' internal editor forcing me to do all my design work at the 
code level which taught me a great deal about the value of graph paper.

The first object implemented was the Voyager 2 since it was a real
object and the design of it was a given.  Armed with as many images
from the internet and the library as I could find I slowly built the
voyager as a CSG consisting of around 900 individual basic objects 
(by far the most detailed object I have done).  It is the only object in 
the scene to have a real life scale where 1 unit = 1 metre.

Next I tackled the alien mother ship which I called the explorer (named 
before I determined it is actually a trade ship).  I laboured over the
design for this ship because I had very specific requirements.  It had 
to be obviously alien and I wanted to suggest that the ship's hull is 
organic not metallic.  So I started experimenting with a scaled lathe
object and found a shape that I liked.  Then I added a couple of small scaled
spheres to one end of it (barely visible in the final ship) and thought it 
needed something more.  So I added a couple of rotated/scaled/clipped torii
to the top of it and liked the wing effect it gave but figured it looked
more like a support than wings so I thought what can this be supporting?  
This is the moment where the particle beam road came to me and it just
looked right adding to the alien-ness of the ship as it is so alien that 
it does not even operate on the same principles of propulsion as we would
imagine.  The organic texture was actually a borrowed texture from a planet 
in one of my previous projects.  I am uncertain as to the origin of the 
texture and it may be the only portion of this scene which violated my 
"no tools" rule as I suspect it was designed in Texture Magic (may have 
even been a provided texture with that program).  The final texture was
modified by hand, however, to get the effect required.  It was 
also used as the base texture for the "road" beam (heavily modified with
many test renders) which I wanted to have streaks in it to imply motion 
along the length of the beam and to have some transparency to it.

The probe was the object that gave me the most trouble and I am still not 
entirely happy with it.  It had to have a look which implied that it 
belonged to the mother ship (was designed by the same species, etc) hence
the repetition of the texture and the smaller beam used to control the probe 
from the mother ship's engine.  In the end the probe was
constructed as a simple CSG similar to the mother ship.

The scanning beam is simply a scaled cone beginning at the front of the probe 
and ending just past the dish of the Voyager 2 or so it seems as the beam is 
actually a fair way in front of the voyager and does not intersect at all.
Time constraints prevented me from getting a true intersection that looked 
right.  The texture of the cone is partially transparent to give the 
impression of a particle beam and the colour was chosen to imply the beam 
comes from the particle beam road's beam.

The stars were originally done using the provided star field textures on a 
sky sphere but when I began doing 800x600 anti-alised test renders I found 
the stars disappeared.  I played around with the star field texture and 
finally decided to create my own starfield using actual sphere objects.
I created a while loop which created a sphere and pushed it back into the 
scene a random distance between two adjustable values.  Then the sphere's 
location would be rotated on the y and then the x axis a random amount
again between two adjustable values.  The sphere was coloured white and 
given an ambient value of 1 to make it shine without lighting.  Repeated
3000 times this gives a very acceptable deep space star field which 
survives anti-aliasing.
                                         
Rendered at 800x600 with anti-alias of 0.3                                      
  
                                         
That's it.  The only external tool I had to use was to convert the image to 
JPEG and that was Paint Shop Pro 4.  Lost a little quality but not much.  All 
the source is provided - feel free to try it.

The only elements I would have liked more time on was the scanning beam to 
make it really intersect the voyager and the position and effect of the scenes
lighting.  And the design of the probe could use some work.
                                             
My New Year's resolution is to enter at least every second round of this comp
so feel free to critique the scene so I can learn.

Dave.

