TITLE: Oh, the humanity... NAME: David Morgan-Mar COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/ TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: dmhinden.jpg ZIPFILE: dmhinden.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (material maps, editing of image maps, and jpeg conversion) Paper, pencil, ruler. "Hindenburg, An Illustrated History", Rick Archbold, ISBN 0-297-81423-0 RENDER TIME: 5 hours, 40 minutes, 16 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen, and what a sight it is, a thrilling one, just a marvellous sight. It is coming down out of the sky pointed toward us, and towards the mooring mast. The mighty diesel motors roar, the propellers biting into the air and throwing it back into gale-like whirlpools... "No one wonders that this great floating palace can travel through the air at such speed with these powerful motors behind it. The sun is striking the windows of the observation deck on the eastward side and sparkling like glittering jewels against a background of black velvet... "It's burst into flames! Get this, Charlie, get this, Charlie. Get out of the way, please, oh, my, this is terrible, oh, my, get out of the way, please! It is burning, bursting into flames and is falling on the mooring mast and all the folks we... this is one of the worst catastrophes in the world! Oh, it's four or five hundred feet into the sky, it's a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. Oh, the humanity!" - Herbert Morrison, Lakehurst, New Jersey, May 6, 1937, 7:25 pm. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is a recreation of an actual photograph of the Hindenburg explosion which ended the era of the rigid airships. The original photo is monochrome, so I had to come up with the colours myself. All the POV code was created by hand - no modellers were used. I figured for the History topic a recreation of an actual newspaper page from history would be a good idea. I found a book with the actual New York Times front page for the day after the disaster, and scanned it in to make the border of this image. The photograph on that front page was not as dramatic as this one, so I took the liberty of recreating the better photo. The image was created in one pass through POV-Ray - the central image was not rendered first and image-mapped on to a newspaper. The newspaper surrounding the picture is an imagemap scan of the actual New York Times front page for the day after the disaster, slightly rearranged to give more space to the picture. It is mapped on to an intersection of two flat boxes, leaving a hole in the centre to show the rest of the image through the middle. The airship itself is a surface of revolution, with a custom normal slope_map to give the ribbing where the internal girders hold the skin in place. The girderwork can be seen at the stern as the skin of the ship burns away - this was done by using a material map for the skin and making part of it transparent. The girders are just long, thin boxes. The girder-work on the mooring mast tower is also just boxes, unioned together and a simple red/white gradient pattern applied to the whole. The explosion was the hardest part... I had to experiment a lot to get the media just right. Each fireball is actually a light source, so the explosion and fire provides almost all the lighting in the scene. The results are quite good, I think, but they still need some work to hide the fairly obvious spherical shapes. I actually added a last minute texture change to the enclosing objects before the final render to make the fire texture better (which worked), but it unfortunately also increased the obviousness of the shape outline. The people and other objects are fairly simple CSG objects - most of the details went into the larger pieces. I'm quite proud of the sky. It's a sky_sphere with three layered colour_maps to get the oppressive overcast feel. There is some subtle colour in there to avoid the overwhelming grey effect. Unfortunately, time really ran out on me and I haven't been able to complete this image to the quality I would like. There are some small details in the photograph that I wanted to model, and some of the existing items could use a bit of refinement. The zip file contains all the code, plus the image and material maps used by it.