TITLE: spirit NAME: Bernd Sieker COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: bsieker@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de WEBPAGE: -- TOPIC: history COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: spirit.jpg ZIPFILE: spirit.zip RENDERER USED: Blue Moon Rendering Tools 2.4.0.3 (2.4c) (http://www.bmrt.org/) TOOLS USED: mops (http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~rschultz/mops/) for modedlling The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) for making the texture and adding copyright tag to the final image RENDER TIME: about 34 hours. HARDWARE USED: Intel Celeron 412 MHz, 128 MB RAM, NetBSD-1.4_BETA IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Nothing particular exciting; this image shows the Spirit of St. Louis, the Ryan aircraft of Charles Lindbergh, on its flight acress the Atlantic from New York to Paris. It is believed that this flight and Lindbergh's following PR campaign in the US was historically very important for the development of commercial aviation. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All modelling was done with mops, although still in beta stage this modeller is already quite capable. It produces RIB (RenderMan Interface Bytestream) output suitable for BMRT and PRMan. Rendering was done with BMRT 2.4.0c. GEOMETRY ~~~~~~~~ Most of the geometry consists of NURB patches that were created using the "Build From Curves" function in mops. The engine cylinders are mostly created from CSG objects and some "sweep" NURB objects for the fuel and exhaust pipes, although these are not clearly visible in the final image. The sea under the plane is a simple bilinear patch, the wave patterns on it are created by a displacement shader. SHADERS ~~~~~~~ This time I did not write any custom shaders but could get along find with only more or less 'standard' shaders that can be found on the web. RenderMan shaders are small programs written in the 'RenderMan Shading Language', where almost anything in texturing and deforming geometry is possible. I used one custom-painted image map to project the Label on the front part of the aircraft's fuselage. RENDERING ~~~~~~~~~ The image was rendered using Larry Gritz' splendid Blue Moon Rendering Tools, using a volume shader for the atmosphere effects, two area light sources, motion blue and radiosity. The latter is barely visible in the resulting image, but for some scenes it can greatly improve realism. Peak memory usage of the renderer during rendering was only 28 MB.