TITLE: Cover-up!
NAME: John K. Dewhurst
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: dewhurst@physnet.phys.wits.ac.za
WEBPAGE: -
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: coverup.jpg
ZIPFILE: coverup.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    UVPOV-Ray (Unofficial version by Nathan Kopp)

TOOLS USED: 
    Spatch, Terrain Maker, Corel Draw

RENDER TIME: 
    54 mins 22 secs

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium Pro 200

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Remember when Viking's "face on Mars" turned out to be a rather
unexceptional lump of rock thanks to the Mars Global Surveyor?

Or so everyone thought. In reality it was a perfectly sculpted
humanoid face - our First Encounter with alien intelligence. The
powers that be, however, decided that the average pleb would be
incapable of calmly comprehending this little revelation and so
a frantic cover-up ensued. In the end the photographs of the
region where the face is located were faked by the NSA (rendered
with POV-Ray no less) and released to the world's media.

In this scene we see President Clinton signing this dastardly plan
into effect as well as the wind- and water-ravaged Cydonia region
on Mars where the real face is located.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The presidential hands and the face were created using Mike Clifton's
superb S-Patch. The face was then turned into a height field using
POV-Ray itself and weathered with Eric Jorgensen's Terrain Maker.
To achieve the fade-out - fade-in effect without breaking the post-
processing rule, the Martian surface was placed slightly above the
desk and a colour map was used with variable transmittance.
I thought it would be more fun to devise an alien which could have
evolved in the martian conditions than simply having a human-like face.
It would have to be able to survive dry conditions (xeromorphic is the
word, I think) so I gave it an exoskeleton. The thin atmosphere would
dictate large bony ears; and the month-long dust storms, seen recently
on Mars, give the creature its articulated snout, a bit like a camel.
The cover-up document itself is of course pure fiction. Some of the
terms and acronyms were taken from "The Company" by John Erlichman,
but beyond that it's all made up.
I gratefully acknowledge the use of images and ideas from the following
sites:
www.whitehouse.gov (Bill's signature)
mars.jpl.nasa.gov (the "faked" images ;-)
www.nsa.gov

Now awaiting a visit from the MIB...
JKD.

