This landscape is defined with patches, polygons, fractals, particle systems, graftals, and a variety of procedural models. The various elements were rendered separately and composited later. The piece is very much a team effort, a "one-frame movie". The credits, in alphabetical order, are:

• Loren Carpenter used fractals for the mountains, rock, and lake, and a special atmosphere program for the sky and haze. He also wrote the hidden-surface program.

• Rob Cook directed the picture and had the original concept. He designed the road, hills, fence, and wrote the texture-mapping and appearance factors software. He studied the theory of rainbows (in Minnaert's classic Light and Color in the Outdoors) and generated the theoretically accurate one for this piece. 

• Tom Porter provided the procedurally drawn texture for the hills and wrote the compositing software.

• Bill Reeves used his particle systems for the grass and wrote the modeling software.

• David Salesin put the ripples in the puddles.

• Alvy Ray Smith designed and rendered the flowering plants using his procedural graftal software. Cf white.sands.

The picture was rendered and composited using a VAX computer with an Ikonas framebuffer as picture memory. It took about a month to execute mainly because it had to be executed by parts, the final resolution of the desired image - 2048x2048 pixels, 24 bits per pixel - being far greater than that of our framebuffer (512x512 pixels). So 16 complete framebuffer-sized tiles were rendered and composited in a 4x4 tiling. The piece was scanned onto film at full resolution with a COLOR FIRE 240, courtesy of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, Ltd.

Created at Lucasfilm Ltd in Marin County, California in April, 1983. Also exhibited at The Computer Museum, Boston, 1984-1985.