TITLE: Alien Pyramids
NAME: Micah Ellison
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: micasoftxx@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: alienpyr.jpg
ZIPFILE: alienpyr.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray

RENDER TIME: 
    Oh man, I didn't record it ... it was less than 45 minutes,
though.

HARDWARE USED: 
    A little Pentium 120 laptop w/ 32 megs of RAM and Win95. It
really helps to hook up a larger monitor (even if it's four years old) and then
there's always a mouse that beats the touchpad.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Well, first I wanted to make a nice picture of the pyramids. It would be
beautiful and inspirational. Then I got real and decided to make it
interesting. I modeled it after a photo of the Great Pyramid my parents had
taken, then put aliens above it. The aliens are turning the rising desert dust
into the wonder that is the Pyramids. The date? Eight thousand B.C. There's
still a little moisture left in the desert from the Ice Age, so the dunes
aren't so big (erosion). And no, I don't really believe in this stuff ... it's
just fun to depict. Anyway, everyone knows that it was the people from Atlantis
that built the pyramids, not the aliens. :-)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The pyramid itself: I went on the Internet to various pyramid-related sites. I
found the dimensions of the pyramids. I made a tapering sweep of a square, then
scaled it xy to 2.3. I used a calculator to find the tangent of 55 degrees (the
angle of the real pyramid is actually 54 degrees and 54 minutes), then I
multiplied it times 2.3 to get 2.8111, which is the height of the pyramid. I
didn't worry about texturing the pyramid well because I knew it was going to be
a silhouette, so I gave it the same texture as the desert.
The desert sand: I just made a plane with that color, then added a granite
normal with a bump dempth of 0.5. It worked out beautifully ... I wasn't going
for that dune look, I just didn't want it flat.

The alien saucer: The saucer looks so different when viewed seperate from this
scene. It's a rotational sweep, and I didn't close it at the bottom (on
purpose). The hole is were the beam comes from. I layered two textures for this
saucer - an onion colormap (it's totally black except for yellow concentric
rings of light) and dents (scaled down to represent little yellow lights). It
looks really bad unless in this setting ... but it's made only for this
setting.

The beam: It's media, and I love it. I made a texture with a granite density and
an emission color of rgb 0, .75, .75 (kinda like teal). The beam is a
rotational sweep going from the hole in the saucer to a circle around the
pyramid.

The lense flare: It's a predefined one in Moray called TV-Day. It's set to the
only light in the scene, which is the sun. The sun's coordinate values are 500,
900, 190 (z being up). It has to be that far away for realistic shadows. This
is even more frustating in a scene with columns (the shadows aren't parallel).
That's why this is the only day scene that I'm proud of ... night scenes are so
much easier (and look cooler anyway, imho).

The sky: It's actually a gradient z yellow to red skysphere, but different
because of the dust. I put the skysphere in an .inc file, which I included into
Moray.

The ... dust? Yes, it's fog! Ground fog, in fact! It has an altitude of 5, which
is well above the pyramid! The camera is in fact at 1, well inside the fog ...
er, dust. I really thought it wasn't going to work, but it exceeding my
expectations. All I wanted was a small layer of dust, but this is what makes
the scene look so ... cool.

The second saucer: I just duplicated the saucer and the beam, but not the
pyramid. This saucer has just started to build the other pyramid.

Finally, I added a small cube underneath the camera to make the viewer feel as
if he's not so low. It doesn't make a conscious impression, but it does affect
the unconscious eye.

