TITLE: The Unnatural History Museum
NAME: John Gardiner
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: john@thegardiners.co.uk
TOPIC: Museum
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jwgtuhm.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Poser4 to create alien figures. PoseRay to import figures into
POV-Ray. Thumbs Plus to convert image to jpg.

RENDER TIME: 
    3m 28s

HARDWARE USED: 
    2.66 GHz Pentium 256 MB Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Another time. Another galaxy. A model of a shattered and lifeless earth hangs in
the shadow of a long-dead soldier. Not that the museum's visitors see any
tragedy in this. In fact the 'Planets of Self Extinction' exhibition is a great
success - guaranteeing to keep the kids amused for hours.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The aliens are based on a Poser female (Daz3D's Victoria). Once imported into
POV-Ray I added the tails, partly to put in a bit of effort and make the
picture a little more 'mine' (rather than just bought-in objects), and partly
to make sure they really were alien and not just weird humans. The tails are
made by a macro generating spheres close enough together to make a smooth
curve.

To get the 'shattered earth' I traced round the land masses from a satellite
photo, and used the result as a template to create a bump map in an ordinary
paint program. I then added an image map by colouring over the bump map. I
wasn't sure if a lifeless sea should still be blue, but when I tried other
colours, like muddy brown, it seemed to stop looking like earth at all.

I built the picture up using a wide camera angle: starting with the figures,
then the earth, the props, and finally the room, only to find the room's
verticals were very distorted. A matrix sheer applied to the room object helped
to straighten them out.


