GenScout Fast Lander

A Genscout fast lander is seen here in a maintenance hangar. Five senior engineers gathered underneath the hull are discussing problems with the ship, because it has apparently suffered catastrophic drive failure.

Genscout started life around February 1997, as a Polyray model. It was converted to POV-Ray in Summer 1999. The Hangar scene goes back to September 1999. The groundcrew personnel are adapted from the work of H.E.Day, and the rest of the scene is my own work. Area lights and fade_distance are used. Coupled with the hull texture, a full render at 640x480 with anti-aliasing was typically taking 36 hours on a 133MHz Pentium.

A history of the scene's development in POV-Ray

December 2001: Changing the basic cube shapes to supperelipsoids saved a lot of time in rounding off the edges. All the rounding off of the corners is done in one definition, rather than specifying a CSG of 23 boxes, cylinders and spheres.

Additionally, the interior of the ship was defined. The green glow adds a certain mystique. The service vehicle in front is good but needs to be moved out the way so the ship can be seen to be hovering. More "stuff" is required on the floor: boxes, cabling, hoses. That sort of thing. Maybe a shiny floor is not appropriate.

July 2000: The base texture of the ship is there, though the squared-off nature of the ship still looks unnatural. Here it is rendered on a shiny runway on a planetary surface for a touch of variety.

August 1999: The basic shape of the ship after conversion from Polyray, in an early hangar which was open to a blue sky. Both the hangar and the ship lack a sense of proportion: the doors in the hangar walls aren't convincing enough to give an idea of scale.