EMAIL: jull43@ij.net
NAME: Matthias M. Giwer
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Mercury image natural formation, says NASA
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/jull43 
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1e
TOOLS USED: Photoshop, Eye Candy, for height field, format 
conversion and a brightness correction 
RENDER TIME: 2m22s
HARDWARE USED: PII/333 128M Win98

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: NASA scientists maintain the images sent from 
the Mercury Orbiter are a natural formation. Dr. Hoagland remains 
skeptical. 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Out of frustration for 
the unsubtle use of heigh fields, out of "if you can't lick 'me, 
join 'em," out of since some people obviously like this sort of 
scene, winning isn't everything, its the only thing. 

     And then just playing around last night and coming up with 
something that was "unbelievably" suggestive of the image 
description. 

     I created an image in Photoshop using a large canvas and 
some predefined brushes (the "came with" I think) An eye is one 
of them, and dotted them in some different colors and modest but 
not careful patterns such as a large but sloppy letter D. 

     Then I selected the whitespace and applied the Eye Candy 
inner bevel. I repeated that process until the canvas was full. 
Those are the "dikes" around the whatevers, cooling vents? 

     I then rendered this as a height field with trial and error 
scaling and point of view. 

     BTW: If anyone things this is deviating a bit to much from 
the spirit of the rules, I would not argue with them in the 
least. Consider it another example of what can be done in 
POV-Ray. At least I have seen nothing like it before. And if we 
had found this on the radar terrain mapping of Venus, 
unbelievable to be sure. 

     The .tga file only zips down to 1.2 meg but if anyone really 
wants it, it is available and in a 190k reduced size version