TITLE: Bluebird V NAME: Bob Chmilnitzky COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: jjaguar@worldnet.att.net WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~chmilnir TOPIC: Old Technology COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: bluebird.jpg ZIPFILE: bluebird.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.3a, HamaPatch 2.9, Paint Shop Pro 5, JPEG Optimizer 3.01. RENDER TIME: 5 hours 15 minutes 8 seconds HARDWARE USED: K6-2 300mhz, 320 meg RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: As a pair of seagulls scramble to safety, Sir Malcom Campbell starts a high-speed run in the Bluebird V. On March 7, 1935, Campbell and the Bluebird set a new official land speed record of 276.710 mph in the flying mile. The smooth, wide, hard-packed sands of Daytona Beach, Florida made for ideal conditions and was the location of many speed record attempts from 1905 through the mid-1930's. Bluebird was 29 feet long, weighed 12,000 lbs, and was powered by a 2,500 hp, 2,227 cubic inch supercharged Rolls Royce V12 aircraft engine. Built and maintained by a crew of aeronautical engineers rather than automobile mechanics, Bluebird V represented the state of the art in automotive technology of it's day. To claim an official record, an average of two timed runs in opposite directions is taken in order to compensate for the effects of wind and slope. Campbell's course started just south of the Main Street Pier in Daytona, driving under the pier (some supporting pylons were removed to make room, and this gap remains today), and ended in Ormond Beach to the north. In this image, Campbell has just started a run in the northerly direction, and is only about a quarter-mile past the pier. Today the current record now stands at 763 mph, faster than the speed of sound. Bluebird V's record was the last set in Daytona, before such attempts were moved west to the deserts of Bonneville. There, Campbell was able to coax Bluebird to over 300 mph. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Good source material was the key to this picture. I've lived in Daytona Beach and the central Florida area for about 12 years and I think local knowledge really helped with this image. I've been to this very spot many times. I've also seen Bluebird V in the museum at the Daytona International Speedway, where it is currently on display. I was also able to find some good reference photos of the car on the beach. With these photos I was able to identify two distinctly different configurations for the car, the 1935 Daytona setup (which I modeled), and the 1936 Bonneville configuration. I wanted this image to have an antique sepia tone look. However, since tinting the image in post-processing is out, I had to find a way to do it in the renderer. Instead, everything in the scene itself is modeled in carefully-selected sepia tone colors. I accomplished this by first building the entire scene in full color, then pasting each color from every material into PSP and converting them to their sepia tone equivalent, and finally replacing the original colors in every material with these. A bit tedious, but I found this was the only way to get accurate sepia tints. The .zip file includes three small test renders illustrating this process. One image shows the scene in full color, the others show the scene at different stages in the color conversion process. I then placed a plane in front of the camera with a fine, nearly transparent bozo colormap with a uniform brown color that varied in filtering on one layer and black transparent streaks on another. This gave an overall yellow-brown tint and left specks and stains that give the image an old, dirty, grainy look. Bluebird's bodywork was built in Hamapatch. I loaded a photo in the background of the tool to help shape the body exactly. The car is covered with seams and rivets (typical 1930's aircraft construction) and while I modeled the seams, I left off the rivets because I found that they are too small to see in the image. Campbell was also done in Hamapatch. I recycled the head and body from the patch skier in my "Winter" round entry but made a new helmet and goggles. The car's accessories (wheels, exhaust pipes, windscreen glass, etc...) were made with CSG in Moray. The trail of dust behind the car is made up of spheres filled with a combination emission/absorption media, which I felt looked more like a light sand cloud than scattering media. I used a little artistic license in exaggerating the level of dust a bit. The actual runs were done on slightly damp and very hard sand, and in reality very little sand was kicked up. However, this left the image looking very static and I felt a bigger cloud gives the picture a greater sense of motion. The water is a plane with a crackle surface normal. I had some trouble modeling the breaking surf. I ended up using a heightfield made from 1m space imagery of waves near the Main Street Pier, which I downloaded from Microsoft Terraserver (http://terraserver.microsoft.com). The heightfield is partially sunk below the surface of the water plane, leaving the white surf poking up through it. This level of surf is consistent with the sea state visible in my reference photos, and is positioned and scaled correctly based on the areal photo. The beach is a heightfield I made with the airbrush tool in PSP. This is probably a bit of overkill since the beach is flat and could have been represented by a simple plane, but originally I had the camera positioned on the top of some dunes present a little bit farther away from the water. I moved the camera but didn't want to redo the beach because the dunes are (barely) visible in the reflections on the front wheel and bodywork. The pier is standard CSG. Since it's about a quarter mile away, it didn't have to be very detailed. The pier I modeled is based on a photo dated 1920. The only major visible change to the pier today is the installation of a cablecar ride running it's length. I'm guessing it was installed after 1935 and therefore didn't include it. The miscellaneous objects on the beach are also almost all basic CSG, modelled from originals seen in several source photos. I had to guess on their colors, however. I don't know what the sign said, it was only visible from the back. :-) The two seagulls and the sock part of the windsock are patches made in Hamapatch. The sky sphere is a simple gradient texture. The clouds in the sky are a series of transparent planes. A little bit of ground fog far in the distance helps blend the clouds into the horizon. The image was rendered in a wide aspect ratio to accentuate the horizontal movement of the car. The final render was converted to .jpg in PSP, and I tweaked the compression with JPEG Optimizer. In addition to the aforementioned color test renders, I've also put a pair of photos of the real Bluebird V in the .zip for reference. Note that in the rollout photo there are a pair of rodlike objects coming out of the radiator exhaust duct that I did not model. I don't know what purpose these rods serve (any ideas?), they are almost always visible when the car is stopped but are never present when the car is running and therefore are not on my car. P.S. Sorry for the long-winded text file.