EMAIL: pconophy@walldata.com
NAME: Phillip A. Conophy
TOPIC: School
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Among the Crystal Reefs
COUNTRY: USA
RENDERER USED: povray 3.01
TOOLS USED: FRGen v1.4, Raw2Pov v1.8
RENDER TIME: 2.5hrs
HARDWARE USED: PPro150
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
The fish model is a CSG creation primarily pre-planned on a pad of graph
paper.  The model has 6 control points.  One for each eye, one for each
fin, and 2 for the tail.  The fish have primarily a chrome texture while
their fins have a varient chrome with a ripple.  The eyes and engine
exhaust are halos.

The crystal asteroids were generated with the aid of Steve Anger's FRGen
and Raw2Pov utilities.  I gave FRGen the Sphere.Fr file as input with
level 3 recursion and noise scaling.  The resultant Raw file was given
to Raw2Pov for conversion and smoothing.  Both of the asteroids visible
in the scene are the same object viewed from different angles and with
different scaling.  Each has some varient of the Ruby_Glass stock
texture.

I had difficulty generating a star field that was not too faded with 
anti-aliasing.  In the end, I rendered the star field as an independant
scene without anti-aliasing then projected it onto a back-plane as an
image_map.  The backdrop also included the nebula which was created as
a pair of halos which are scaled into oblong spheres then overlaped.