EMAIL:         godfrey@shipbrook.net
NAME:          Jeff Lee
TOPIC:         Imaginary Worlds
TITLE:         Delta Vega
COUNTRY:       USA
WEBPAGE:       http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/raytrace/
COPYRIGHT:     I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
HARDWARE USED: AMD K62-350 with 128MB memory
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1a (OS/2 compile)
RENDER TIME:   26 minutes, 36 seconds (at +A0.1)
TOOLS USED:    OS/2 System Editor, PhotoFinish, LView Pro 1.B2/16,
               CorelDRAW! 3.0

A raytraced re-creation of the matte painting by Albert Whitlock, used to depict the lithium cracking station on Delta Vega in the second pilot of the original "Star Trek" TV series (later modified to serve as the Tantalus V penal colony in a subsequent episode).

The boulders in the foreground are height fields created from images "painted" by hand in PhotoFinish (a basic image-retouching package which came with my scanner) to resemble the ones in the original matte painting.

The conic prisms in front of the foreground building's windows were laid out in CorelDRAW!, in order to get the coordinates for the prism's points.

All of the other objects in the screen were created by hand, using the OS/2 system editor (the equivalent of Windows Notepad).

Because the original painting was drawn in a one-point perspective difficult to duplicate with POV-Ray, the angles of the 3D rendering do not exactly match the original. For convenience, a scan of the original matte painting (from "The Art of Star Trek", p. 23) is included in the accompanying .zip file, and at <http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/raytrace/graphics/ref-dvga.jpg>.

Although the scene contains 12,900 objects, by far the vast majority of those objects are contained in the plants in front of the building at the right.

Converted to JPEG (85% quality) with LView Pro.