This is a still image from an animation, of the camera flying through some space
stuff (meteors, asteroids...or just plain rocks!) The animation is posted over
at p.b.animations. It was hard to find a good 'representative' image, as
everything is in motion.

I've always liked the dynamic 'spatial' look of such scenes in movies, but never
actually created one in POV-Ray until now. It has motion blur but no
antialiasing.

The many rocks are just copied-and-scaled versions of three basic ones, all made
in that old but useful patch-based program sPatch. To keep the shadows from
getting too dark (and to avoid time-consuming radiosity on all the animation
frames) I overlaid identical rocks, but with no_image and a somewhat transparent
pigment. (The 'visible' rocks are made no_shadow.) This way, each final 'dual
meteor rock' is translucent to the lights, and casts a shadow that's not quite
so dark.

The background is a composite of two NASA photos--one of a nebula, the other of
just stars.

The lighting isn't realistic, not was it meant to be. I wanted it to look
similar to what the Italian 'giallo' director Mario Bava might have used. He had
a liking for 'unrealistic' primary colors, which gave his films a definite
visual style--especially in Technicolor!

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Attachments:
Download 'meteors.jpg' (268 KB)

Preview of image 'meteors.jpg'

Looks nice, and I love such stuff!

Why not you put the resulting animation on YouTube, I really would love to see
the result!

I do spaceships and stations in POV-Ray. I once did the "Space Carrier Seneca",
you might find it somewhere here when you search. However, during
installation-related issues with a previous version of POV-Ray, I unfortunately
lost all the scene files and includes.

Working on a new ship now, a cargo ship of 15 km length, with a hangar bay 2 km
long! Maybe we could combine our forces...

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