TITLE: Halfway House
NAME: Peter Clarke
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter-clarke@dial.pipex.com
WEBPAGE: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/peter-clarke
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pbcspace.jpg
ZIPFILE: pbcspace.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel Photo Paint (for background image of stars)

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    More of a spacemark than a landmark. This space station,
loosely based on the 
one in the film "2001", does not orbit the Earth but lies at the edge of the
Solar System and acts as a travel 
inn for those brave people on their way to the stars.  

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The image consists of two main
objects and a background.
Nothing clever went into the spacestation or flying saucer, but much use was
made of metallic textures. The 
spacestation is new, but I thought it would be nice to add a flying saucer that
I created some time ago to the
scene. The background consists of an image map (photo of stars) placed onto a
very large box and took me a 
long time to get right. First I tried mapping the stars photo onto a sky_sphere
but the result was awful. Mapping 
the stars onto a distant large box caused problems with lights and shadows.
These problems were only solved by 
removing some lights from the scene and carefully positioning the others. To
keep the resolution of the stars I 
used a large image. A lot of the render time was due to the background image. I
would be interested to know of
a better way of creating a background using an image map. The stars photo is not
included in the zip file.

