TITLE: Moon Gate
NAME: Mihai Bisca
COUNTRY: Romania
EMAIL: mbasca@go.ro
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: moongate.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    HF-Lab, POV-Ray, Gimp, Slackware Linux

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 13 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 1.2GHz, 256Mb DDRAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Earth viewed from the moon, near a timeless stone
gate. They say the moon will be our gateway to the stars. But what if
someday we'll find out it has been visited by others before us ?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The moon is a height field made with HF-Lab. 

For the stones, which are isosurfaces, I wrote my own macro, based on 
a simple pigment function added to a sphere. 

The earth is just that, taken with Gimp from the famous NASA image of
the earthrise. It is so much more realistic than creating a layered
texture sphere, although the resolution is low. 

The stars are two kinds of tiny spheres, placed randomly on the sky.

