TITLE: Airship
NAME: David R. Heys
COUNTRY: Canada (currently residing in the U.S.A.)
EMAIL: arcana@sinbad.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/soho/studios/8975
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: airship3.jpg
ZIPFILE: airship3.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRAY

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch (creation of airship body), Photoshop (conversion to Jpeg)

RENDER TIME: 
    Approximately 2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 166 with 48 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The world has seen a ton of Great Engineering Achievements over the years. 
Some are physically impressive, some are more subtle and sublime. When 
digging around for a choice to fit the theme, I decided to bypass some of 
the more enduring examples (such as the Pyramids, and the Golden Gate Bridge),
and look at examples of what may have been more enduring had time and 
circumstance not conspired.

I finally made my choice for a topic when I began reading a science fiction
novel titled The Two Georges. The novel is a "what if" novel in which the
American Colonies had never seceded from Great Britain. The timeframe for
the novel is current day, and it's very interesting to see how the authors 
envision technological and socio-political evolution from the 1700's to 
current day.

One major change was that travel was predominantly done by train or airship
(blimp, zeppelin, etc..). Airplanes, in this novel, are still of the Sopwith
Camel variety and are used strictly by the military.

Airships are amazing examples of engineering, and quite likely would have 
developed to be our standard method of travel these days. The Hindenburg
disaster, combined with the advent of World War II and the attendant
technological developments in airplane design that happened during the war,
pretty much eliminated any chance that airships had of dominating the air
travel industry.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I did a rather extensive search of the web, looking for pictures, schematics,
etc.. of airships and their design. While I found quite a few photos, I was
not able to get any schematics. As a result, everything created for this 
image is done with guesswork and "eye-balling". While the airship will look 
similar to both Zeppelins and American airship designs, it will not exactly
match any one ship in particular.

The major object in this scene is the body of the airship. I designed it in
sPatch and exported it to POV. Everything else is done with CSG in POVRAY. 
Trying to get the exact placement of the engines, gondola, image map, etc
onto the body of the ship nearly drove me to distraction. This was because 
the body is made up of something over 2700 objects and takes ages to parse,
even for small 320X240 test renders. Most of the time, I used a simple
scaled sphere as a representation of the ship's body.

I'm particularly happy with most of the textures. Almost every object has
a multi-layered texture, and I think it helped a great deal in making things
look "right". I'm still not happy with the grass/ground texture. If I'd had
more time, and fewer commitments, I would have done more. The two textures
I'm most proud of are the canvas texture on the airship, and the texture of
the girding, sandwiched between the outer and inner layers of the hangar.

As with most others submitting to the competition, if I did not have to 
submit this image to the competition, I'd likely never finish with it. I
don't suppose we're ever truly happy with our own work. :{)