TITLE: Spatial Crunch
NAME: Peter Duthie
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: rdx_irtc@warlordsofbeer.com
WEBPAGE: http://art.warlordsofbeer.com/
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: spatialc.jpg
ZIPFILE: spatialc.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5 (win2k for development, linux for render)

TOOLS USED: 
    Text editors, ImageMagick (for conversion to jpeg), custom Perl
script (for the distributed render)

RENDER TIME: 
    51714 seconds (14.4 hours) 525MB peak memory

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual Xeon 1.8GHz, Dual Pentium III 1GHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Even in space, it can get pretty crowded.

The purpose of This image is to illustrate the idea that the future will likely
be a densely populated place and although clever architecture and new frontiers
may help alleviate this to some extent, the problem is none the less
inescapable and will follow humanity no matter where it goes.

The space station in the foreground is of a design commonly seen in film and
literature, consisting of a rotating outer ring whose centripedal force
simulates artifical gravity. 

The buildings contained within the space station are mostly meant to resemble
those constructed in the late 20th / early 21st century, however there are some
differences.

The planet in the background is of course Earth, and the portion of it shown is
a reference to current events.

How does this relate to the topic?  Within the image are three layers of
architecture, embedded within one another.  The contemporary high rise
architecture is embedded within the futuristic space station architecture,
which itself is embedded within the architecture of the universe, the Earth,
the Sun, and the stars.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The image was constructed entirely with Povray CSG objects.

The natural architecture consists of spheres.  The Earth is a sphere mapped
with an image map and a bump map of the real thing from
http://www.space-graphics.com/earthphoto.htm, with the atmosphere simulated
using a slightly larger transparent sphere filled with scattering media.  The
Sun consists of two emmitting media filled spheres, one for the more intense
core, and another depicting the gas and radiance issuing from it.  The stars
were textured on to the inside of a very large hollow sphere, using the
standard Povray starfield combined with a bozo pattern to induce a clustering
effect.

The space station architecture consists of tori and cylinders, combining
metallic chrome, glassy, and 'NASA white' materials to achieve the desired
look.

The buildings are mostly constructed from angular shapes such as boxes,
cylinders and cones, but there are some spheres and tori thrown in there as
well.  The buildings are scaled to a randomly selected size, textured with a
randomly selected texture from a candidate list, then translated and rotated to
a randomly selected place on the space station floor.

Lighting comes from three different areas: The sun, the rocket ship exhaust,
and a ring of spotlights above the buildings.  I decided against using
radiosity, as there was little noticable difference with it turned on due to
the darkness of the background.

To render the scene, I wrote a perl script that renders the image into thin
strips seperately on each machine, and then reassembles them when all parts are
completed in order to fully utilise the two dual CPU machines I have.  My perl
script should scale well enough to use in larger rendering clusters if I can
aquire more hardware in the future!

The .zip file included with my entry contains the full source to my image,
minus the Earth image and bump maps, which can be obtained at the
space-graphics.com URL mentioned above.

This is my first IRTC entry, and I've had enough fun making this image that I'm
sure it won't be my last!