TITLE: Orrery
NAME: Bob Chmilnitzky
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jjaguar@worldnet.att.net
WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~chmilnir
TOPIC: Worlds Within Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: orrery.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3a, NKFlare & Column plugins, Tomtree include
             files, Paint Shop Pro 5, JPEG Optimizer 3.01.

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 40 minutes 14 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6-2 300mhz, 64 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The complex clockwork of an orrery duplicating in miniature the larger
complexity of the solar system.  It's late afternoon, and a nearly-full
Moon and bright Jupiter rise in the distance.

An orrery is a mechanical model that demonstrates the movement of the
planets and their moons around the Solar System.  Mine is loosely
based on several 18th century orreries.  It contains all of the known
solar system as of the mid-18th century, which includes the planets out
to Saturn, the 4 Galilean moons of Jupiter, and Saturn's moon Titan. 
The planets and moons are accurately positioned for January 25th, 2002,
around 5 pm EST.

I used a little artistic license by including Jupiter.  While Jupiter
can be bright enough at times to be faintly visible in daylight, I
exaggerated it's brilliance quite a bit because I felt another
planetary object helped tie the theme together, and it was in the right
place at the right time.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my first entry in the IRTC and, aside from a few tutorials, my
first real attempt at ray-tracing.  I built everything in Moray except
for the sky sphere and the trees, which I had to code by hand in
separate include files.

I thought about this topic for a long time.  My first idea was to do a
computer on a desk, and on it's screen is the same image of a computer
on a desk, and on it's screen is the same image... ad infinitum, but I
discarded that idea because I'm sure there will be a dozen more just
like it.

The orrery is mostly made up of simple CSG rings.  The gears were made
by duplicating triangular shaped teeth around a cylinder.  The
trickiest part was making sure the diameters were correct and the gears
meshed properly.  Unfortunately, you can't really see this detail in
the final image.  The pattern on the outer ring and the earth globe are
textures I drew in Paint Shop Pro.

The sky is pretty basic, just a simple gradient with a little bit of
haze near the horizon.  The sky needed to be clear so I couldn't do
much with it.  I sorta cheated on the moon.  I couldn't get the phase
to look right by illuminating a sphere, so instead I sliced it with a
plane.  I brightened up the texture in PSP and set ambient = 1 to make
it look like it's glowing.  Jupiter is a small star lens flare courtesy
Nathan Kopp's NKFlare plugin.

I wanted to keep the courtyard simple, because I wanted the focus of
the picture to be on the orrery and moon.  It serves mostly to contain
the scene.  In lieu of a conventional, pasted-in copyright notice (I
find them tacky and obtrusive), I worked my initials and the year into
the ironwork of the gate.  The iron scrollwork on the bench are
heightfields I drew in PSP, which came out much nicer than I expected
(it's a shame it's not closer to the camera).  The equatorial sundial
is perched on a Keith Hull plugin column.

I made the trees (a cabbage palm, orange trees, saw palmettos, and
bamboo) with Tomtree.  Tropical plants explain why there's no snow in
January ;-) (plus, I'm from Florida where they're common).  To give the
bamboo some natural irregularity (and disguise the fact I used the same
model for each plant), I wrote a macro to randomly scatter the bamboo
over an area, and give each plant a random height, tilt, and rotation.

The final render was converted to .jpg in PSP, and I tweaked the
compression with JPEG Optimizer.

Since this is my first entry, constructive comments not only welcome,
but encouraged.

