Not!

To all war hawks and carrion crows out there, playing your games for mastership and dominion:

You got it all wrong - THIS IS NOT A CHECKERED PLANE!

(Does the concept need any more elaboration? I don't think so.)

This is my scene. This is what brought me back to raytracing and try to really dig it this time, roughly a year ago.

In October '07 (as far as I can reconstruct it), while surfing the internet for some reason long forgotten, a small raytraced shot by a guy named Rod Gelaude caught my eyes. It was a quite crude rendering of a globe, probably already a decade old by the "look & feel" of it, so it would have been nothing special - if Rod hadn't gone for the surrealistic idea of covering it in a layer of swirling clouds. (The shot may still to be found somewhere on http://rod.gelaude.chez-alice.fr) That's what jump-started my imagination.

The concept I had in mind back then was a bit different, but the core of it has remained unchanged: To make a scene that takes the viewer out of his accustomed "first person" perspective, to see the world of his daily life from a perspective that so far has been a privilege of Astronauts: Earth, a fragile "blue marble", wonderful and unique, which to call one's home is the actual privilege. I hope I touched that at least to some degree.

"Blue Marble" is actually the title of a NASA project, in which they collected (and are still collecting) a wide variety of satellite imagery of our home, and make it freely available on the internet. That is where I got most of my texture maps from.

In case you were wondering: The clouds are not mere satellite photographs. The bright leading edges, shadows, and red illumination in the morning (or evening) light were all produced at rendering time, using media effects based on high-resolution NASA satellite data of cloud density (measured by radar I guess).

Apart from the NASA satellite image maps, the globe is 100% hand-coded PoV- ray SDL using CSG shapes; it has been sitting on my virtual desk basically finished for a couple of months now, only occasionally re-visited to give it yet another polish. It had just been waiting for the scene around it to complete, which in turn was waiting for a good TINA-CHeP topic to really make the best of it. It was only a couple of few days ago that it struck me how it would make a perfect fit for this round's topic.

The book is a mesh object originally created using LionSnake, but later polished up using Wings 3D. Like the globe, it has been waiting to be used for quite a while now. For this shot, I chose to make it a copy of "War and Peace" for obvious reasons, but a lucky coincidence drowned everything in shadows except for the word "War".

The hawk and crows are Poser models, converted to PoV-ray format using PoseRay (what else). The chess pieces are mostly free models from the 'net with a bit of polishning-up, except for the knights which are custom-tailored from a rook's base and a somewhat modified head of a free pegasus statue.

Placement of the chess pieces on the globe was done by latitude/longitude using a PoV-ray macro, with choice of locations being partly political, partly otherwise (I'll leave it up to you to figure out the details). The pawn in the hawk's beak was placed in Poser, while the position of the pieces on the ground was hand-coded into the PoV-ray scene.

If you look carefully enough, you will find there are also some peace doves in this shot, but as they're not playing "The Game" (that's why they are peace doves) and are typically not operating at strategic locations, I had them placed by the random generator. I used some maths to make sure they didn't flock at the poles - only to find out later that I had sort of re-invented the VRand_On_Sphere macro. You live and learn.

Illumination uses conventional lighting from two spots - the sun and a dim filler light - plus radiosity. I used light groups to dim the light input on the globe (which was designed for lower overall brightness than the PoseRay- generated birds required), and to avoid too much soft shadow calculations with the atmosphere & clouds. (A previous attempt with high-quality soft shadows on the globe as well was terminated after about 2 days of renderng with still an estimated week to go.) I chose a spotlight for the "sun" to get that all-black background, somewhat reminiscent of the darkness of space.

A low-resolution radiosity pre-render without focal blur and without any area lights took 4h 25m, while the main render with all the bells & whistles took 14h 43m. Output was done in HDR format, post- processed for gamma and brightness in HRDShop, and finalized in Photoshop by adding a signature, changing the color profile to sRGB, and converting to JPEG.

(This entry happens to be compliant with the rules of the "Not A Checkered Plane" special contest, as it is composed of stuff placed on an infinite plane, and there's nothing checkered whatsoever in the whole scene.)