TITLE: Lava World
NAME: Antoine Valentim
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: bumblebee@globalserve.net
WEBPAGE: http://web.globalserve.net/~bumblebee/ecclesia/ecclesia.htm
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lavawrld.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    John P. Beale's HF-Lab 0.90Beta, Chris Colefax's Galaxy Include
files, North Coast Software's Conversion Artist 2.02 (JPEG conversion),
ShoeString's PictureDicer 0.39 (GIF conversion), Microsoft's Paint, Fractal
Design's Dabbler 2.0.4

RENDER TIME: 
    about 4h 30m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Hundreds of years ago, mankind came to the Lava World to mine its precious
minerals.  In order to build cities on the rocky islands in the lava, millions
of nanotech robots were dropped from space onto selected areas.  By accident, a
few robots found their way to an island near one of the target zones.  These
robots didn't have the full instructions necessary to build a human city, but
they began to build a city anyway, to the best of their abilities.  Once it was
complete, they decided to build inhabitants for their city...  

These newly-constructed artificial aliens knew nothing of their origins.  But by
chance, one of them found some data that had been left on their island by the
humans.  Some said this data was the map of their long-forgotten home planet,
and they built a globe of this planet and placed it in the center of their
city.  But others disagreed, saying that the data probably came from that
mysterious domed city across the lava, and that the Earth was nothing but an
Imaginary World...

On the topic "Imaginary Worlds":
I tried to incorporate the idea of "imaginary worlds" in many ways.
1) the Lava World:  It is imaginary!
2) the planet (a gas giant) at the top of the picture:  It is also imaginary,
but I have tried to make it just barely visible, so that it is almost imaginary
even within the picture (i.e. its details are "left to the imagination",
although if it were well-lit you would see some nice bands of colored clouds).
3) the globe of the Earth:  To some of the inhabitants of the Lava world, Earth
itself is an imaginary world.  But even those who believe that the globe in the
center of their city depicts a real planet have a false idea of what the Earth
is like.  If you look at the globe, you will see that the Earth is depicted as
having continents of black rock in oceans of lava (as represented by the
brass).  So the globe does represent an imaginary Earth, to a certain extent,
since it is based on the false assumption that the Earth is much like the
aliens' own world.
4) the human city in the distance:  The inhabitants of this city live in their
own little (imaginary) world.  Projected onto the dome of the city is a
"virtual reality" image of a forested land (which can be seen in the picture as
green color at the bottom of the dome, above which is blue sky, etc.)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

1) The gas giant:  a sphere with a gradient pigment, backlit by a lightsource.
(But it's hardly worth mentioning, really!)

2) the islands:  heightfields made in HF-Lab, and covered in craters.  The
island with the dome was drawn in Dabbler, and then imported into HF-Lab for
"cratering".  The "red-hot" bottom part of the domed island was done using a
gradient pattern. The texture of the large island with the globe on it was done
in an attempt to make it look somewhat moonlike, and yet volcanic at the same
time.

3) The alien city: made of individual hexagonal houses, and bridges connecting
the houses.  I designed the basic layout of the city in Paint, and then wrote
the POV code to connect all the houses and bridges together in an appropriate
manner.

4) The lamps and bronze base of the globe:  these were made using julia fractals
"unioned" with spheres.  The julia fractals surrounded the spheres nicely
around their "equators", and even provided decorative "feet" so that the
spheres wouldn't roll away.  The lamps are all surrounded by emission media to
provide them with glowing haloes of light.

5) The globe:  I drew the mask used in making the globe in Paint, by filling in
(in black and white) the land and ocean areas of:
http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/textures/ear0xuu2.jpg  I must include the following
line for using the image: "Courtesy Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Copyright (c)
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. All rights reserved."  
I then used the mask as an imagemap on a sphere, made the ocean area
transparent, averaged this with a granite texture, and put this sphere over
another one with a brass texture (allowing the brass to show through the
mask).

6) The lava:  a crackle/granite pattern I came up with used as a texture on a
giant sphere.

7) The stars:  made with Chris Colefax's Galaxy Include files.

8) The alien at the bottom right:  The head is a julia fractal (it looks really
nice, but unfortunately the alien is too small to see properly!) with
realistic-looking eyes made of spheres, etc.  The body and arms are made of
blobs, and the alien's sarong is made of another julia fractal and a torus,
stretched out in the y direction and decorated with spiral2 patterns.  The
alien's "flashlight" (attached to its left arm) is just a looks_like
lightsource with an emission media halo surrounding it.  The alien was added to
give the picture a little bit of action, even if that action consists merely of
pointing!

9) The human city:  The dome is made of emission media between spheres (which I
learned how to do from a Chris Colefax post at DejaNews), and the city is a
collection of boxes with a gradient pattern on them to represent the windows on
skyscrapers.

Making this image for the competition was very instructional, but also very time
consuming!  But I had fun doing it.

