TITLE: Redstone Test NAME: Steve Sloan II COUNTRY: USAHOMETOWN: Hartselle, Alabama EMAIL: ssloan@HiWAAY.net WEBPAGE: http://home.HiWAAY.net/~ssloan/ TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: redstone.jpg ZIPFILE: redstone.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.0, Paint Shop Pro 5, printer, ruler, HP28S calculator RENDER TIME: 31 m 42 s HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 200 MHz with 256 MB RAM (Win NT 4) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Since this is a History round, I decided to focus on local history. In northern Alabama, where I live, there are two major periods that would make good images: the Civil War, and the Space Race. I wanted an event I could be proud of, so I chose space rather than slavery. Huntsville, Alabama, nicknamed "The Rocket City", played a large part in America's race to the Moon. The History: ------------ Werner von Braun led the German engineers and scientists at the rocketry base at Peenemuende, where they developed the V2 rocket. The V2 was used for evil, but it was the most advanced rocket of that time, and it led to our current spacecraft. As World War II came to a close, the German scientists and engineers who worked on the V-2 rockets saw that the Nazis were losing. After they found out the Russians were closing on the rocketry base at Peenemuende, they and their families evacuated the country. After a long, harrowing trip through German checkpoints, they eventually surrendered to American forces. The US confiscated the remaining V2 rockets, and shipped the rockets and documentation to Fort Bliss, Texas. Under Project Paperclip, more than one hundred of the Germans agreed to move to nearby White Sands to aid in work on the rockets. In 1950, Fort Bliss officials decided to establish a guided missile center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, so they transferred operations (and the Germans) to Huntsville. Redstone had already produced chemicals and pyrotechnics for WWII, so it was a natural choice. During the early 50s, research on the V2 rockets led to the development of a new missile, the Redstone. Several Redstones were test-fired here in Huntsville during that time. The test stand they used is still sitting on Redstone Arsenal, for tourists from the nearby Marshall Space Flight Center to drive by. BTW, all my info came from the Marshall Space Flight Center's history pages, at http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/history/mm/toc.html The Image Itself: ----------------- I decided to depict the test-firing of an early Redstone rocket. I based the scene on a picture from the Marshall Space Flight Center's history department page, at http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/history/mm/toc.html (I also included that picture in the source, under reference/stand.jpg.) Redstone Arsenal was once farm land, so there really was a large grove of trees behind the test stand. The hills in the background are typical of north Alabama. I also added four pictures to the scene, to represent the history and future of the Redstone rocket. The picture on the lower left shows Werner von Braun demonstrating a model of the V2. He is pointing the rocket upward, toward General George C. Marshall... During WWII, General Marshall served as Chief of Staff of the US Army. In that post, "he helped plan, train and deploy ten million American soldiers and airmen, managing also the scientific development and procurement of the ever-increasingly complex weapons." After the war, his "Marshall Plan" helped rebuild Europe. In 1960, President Eisenhower named the NASA installation in Huntsville after Marshall, because "Marshall's wartime experience enabled him to appreciate the problems of peace stemming from the impact of scientific and technological developments." The General is looking toward the future of the Redstone rocket... A modified Redstone would eventually send the Mercury astronauts into space, including Alan Shephard, the first American in space. This patch commemorates Shephard's famous flight. The Mercury capsule in the patch is falling toward its ultimate goal... The American space program landed the first man on the Moon on July 20, 1969. The Redstone's powerful descendant, the Saturn V, propelled the Apollo 11, and its three-man crew, to Man's first landing on the Moon. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The test stand and Redstone rocket were modeled in Moray. That took the bulk of my time. I printed out stand.jpg (mentioned above), then used my little transparent blue ruler and my HP28S calculator to measure the objects making up the tower. The MSFC history page was nice enough to have a GIF of all the rockets, with measurements, so I used that info to get the scale in feet. The tree and ground textures were developed for an earlier IRTC entry I couldn't finish on time. The trees are CSG of three heightfields. For the main heightfield, I used Paint Shop Pro's paintbrush to draw several white dots on a black background, in a semi-random pattern. The brush tip was set to 20 pixels in diameter, with a hardness of 20. That creates conical shapes with nice, rounded tops. I intersected that height field with a noisy height field to give the trees irregular undersides. I used the tree heightfield again, scaled tall and skinny in the y, as the trunks. That way, the trunks line up with the trees, and you only have to use memory on one height field for both. The height field for the mountains was drawn similarly -- the tallest peak was a white paintbrush dot (same hardness, but different diameter), and the lower peaks were different shades of gray for different heights. The cloudy pigment for the sky sphere was borrowed from a post to the newsgroups. The pictures are simple image maps. The smoky exhaust from the rocket is a media. I tried to use smokegen.inc to create the smoke, but I couldn't figure out how to make its output look right, so I read through its source code to find some reasonable parameters for my own smoke.