The artifact is inspired by the Star Wars franchise. The earth, moon and death star are texture and bump mapped. The spaceship model was exported from blender and programmatically modified to comply with the .ray format. The image also contains jittered AA and environment mapping (for the backdrop of space).

The movie was created by rendering a series of .ray files individually and concatenating them frame-by-frame with the H.264 codec. A C program was written to incrementally generate .ray files from a template and a shell script was used for batch processing the frames.


Attribution:
Score: "The Imperial March", by John Williams, copyright Lucasfilm
3D Model: WireCASE LTD, http://www.wirecase.com/
Texture Maps: http://planetpixelemporium.com/earth.html