EMAIL: john@thegardiners.co.uk
NAME: John Gardiner
TOPIC: Museum
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The Unnatural History Museum
COUNTRY: UK
WEBPAGE:
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.