My Tribute: The Pizza Planet Rocket

Status: rendering, 38 hours so far.

Every graphics student who saw Toy Story came out wanting to make something. This is mine: the rocket from the Pizza Planet sign, built from scratch in POV-Ray 2.2 and ray-traced on my own computer, a 486DX2/66 with 8 megs of RAM that lives on my desk and sounds like a hair dryer. Johanna says it's the third roommate.

Yes, I know. Pixar would have had this done in an afternoon without ray tracing a thing (see my notes on RenderMan). But POV-Ray is what I've got, and it's free, and I love it.

The scene

• The rocket body is a sphere stretched four times taller than it is wide, with a cone on top for the nose. Glossy red, with a little bit of reflection so it picks up the floor.
• Three fins are thin boxes, rotated 120 degrees apart and cut down with a CSG difference so the edges slope.
• The windows are three short cylinders set into the body, glass from textures.inc with a yellow light inside, so they glow.
• The exhaust is a stack of cones in orange and yellow, getting see-through toward the bottom.
• The floor is a checkered plane. Every POV-Ray scene ever made has a checkered floor. It's the law.
• The sky is a huge sphere around everything, dark blue, with no shading on it.

I did it from memory and a sketch I made on a napkin after the second time I saw the movie, so it's my rocket, not a copy. If it's off, that's why.

The top of the scene file, for the curious:

// PIZZAROK.POV  Colleen Schmit, Dec. 1995
#include "colors.inc"
#include "textures.inc"

camera {
   location <0, 5, -16>
   look_at  <0, 4, 0>
}

light_source { <-20, 30, -25> color White }
light_source { <15, 10, -20> color Gray50 }

plane { y, 0
   pigment { checker color White color Gray80 }
}

// rocket body
sphere { <0, 0, 0>, 1
   scale <1.2, 4, 1.2>
   translate <0, 5, 0>
   pigment { color Red }
   finish { phong 0.8 reflection 0.15 }
}

The render log

640 by 480, antialiasing on. POV-Ray prints the line it's working on, so I've been writing it down every time I walk past.

At this rate it should be done sometime Monday night, if nobody trips over the power cord. Then I convert the Targa file to a GIF and put it up right here before I leave for Boise Tuesday. Next scene: Buzz's helmet. Glass and more glass. I'll need a faster computer.

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Last updated Sunday, December 17, 1995