EMAIL:         godfrey@shipbrook.net
NAME:          Jeff Lee
TOPIC:         Imaginary Worlds
TITLE:         Eminiar VII
COUNTRY:       USA
WEBPAGE:       http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/raytrace/
COPYRIGHT:     I submit to the standard raytracing competition copyright.
HARDWARE USED: AMD K62-350
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.01 (OS/2 compile)
RENDER TIME:   37 minutes, 39 seconds (at +A0.001)
TOOLS USED:    OS/2 System Editor, LView Pro 1.B2/16

A raytraced re-creation of the matte painting used to depict the planets Eminiar VII and Scalos in the original _Star Trek_ series (in episodes "A Taste of Armaggedon" and "Wink of an Eye").

The actual objects are, for the most part, extremely simple primitives (boxes, cylinders, cones, a few prisms, et cetera) to which layered textures have been applied to make them appear more complex.

Each object was created individually (working from a photo of the original matte painting on pp. 24-25 of "The Art of Star Trek") and tweaked by itself, before scaling and placing it into the main scene file using the highly scientific method of trial and error.

Some objects were distorted slightly with the "matrix" keyword in order to make their angles more closely resemble their painted counterparts. All objects were created "by hand" in the OS/2 equivalent of Windows Notepad.

One "cheat" that I had to use was caused by the fact that I could not get the shadow of the crosspiece on the central wedge-shaped building to resemble the one in the painting, without throwing the rest of the shadows off. To overcome this difficulty, I applied the "no_shadow" keyword to the crosspiece, then faked a shadow with a thin, semitransparent prism which had the same profile as the crosspiece, with a matrix applied to make it slant downwards.

I attempted to use area lights to soften the shadows in the background, but any suitable values interfered too much with the shadows in the foreground, which (in the original painting) were very crisp and sharp, so I returned to using point lights.

I included an experimental feature: a clear mesh in front of the camera, with an extremely small bozo pattern of transparent brown to simulate a subtle film grain.

A reference image of the matte painting (in use, with actors and partial set inserted) is included in the .zip archive, and is also at <http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/raytrace/graphics/ref-emin.jpg> for your convenience. (Be aware, though, that the colours are somewhat browner in the reference shot than in the reproduction of the actual painting, which was what I actually worked from. Unfortunately, the larger version wouldn't fit onto my scanner.)

The image was converted to JPEG using LView Pro, with a quality setting of 85%.