TITLE: Clash of the Titanium

NAME: Michael Lewis & Luke Nakatsukasa
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: mlewis@esdevel.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.esdevel.com/

TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: titanium.jpg
ZIPFILE: titanium.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 2 for MSDOS

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 2.5b.wat for MSDOS/VistaPro 3.0 for Windows
            Microsoft Image Composer v1.0 (for TGA->JPG conversion)


RENDER TIME: 
    13 hours 27 minutes 57 seconds
CREATION TIME: about 16 hours (spread across 6 weeks)


HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 133/64MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A brightly colored rocket ship tugs a covered wagon through a desert valley;
snowman and
igloo rest on the sand in the foreground.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

1. Luke came up with the cool ideas while I turned them into pixels.
2. Using Moray 2.5b.wat, I created the rocket out of cylinders and cones--low
tech.
3. The engine's flames are really cool (hot?) Bezier patches. The full
definition for these
is in the source code for the image. They were created in Moray.
4. The covered wagon was complex. Each "sag" in the canvas is actually part of a
torus, that
has been CSG clipped with small cubes. The rest of the canvas is just cubes,
while the metal
rings are CSG clipped cylinders. Each wheel is made up of cylinders; the rims
are created
with CSG Difference statements; spokes/axles are just more cylinders.
5. The terrain was created with VistaPro 3.0, and then image mapped onto a big
cube to create
a backdrop illusion, but with shadows. I played with Ambient lighting to avoid
too much
color distortion.

In order to speed up testing, I not only commented out unneeded objects
temporarily, but I
also used POV-Ray's windowing parameters (+SR, +ER, +SC, +EC) to look at just
what I needed.
The final shot is complex -- it took 3.5 hours on a Pentium II 233 with 32MB of
RAM to perform
the final render. The texture map for the backdrop was also
scaled/rotated/translated for a
better look.

