TITLE: Faster Than Light NAME: Travis Schau COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: tschau@umich.edu WEBPAGE: http://www.umich.edu/~tschau/ TOPIC: Speed COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: faster_t.jpg RENDERER USED: maya 6 TOOLS USED: maya 6, photoshop (ship decals) RENDER TIME: 5 minutes HARDWARE USED: mac powerbook, OS X IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image is an illustration of a physics hypothesis I came up with thinking about "speed" for this round: If an object is moving away from a light source faster than the speed of light, then the light no longer can catch up to the object and illuminate the back of it. Rather, the front of the faster-than-light object is now running head-on INTO the light rays from the light source behind it. So, in this image, the space ship is illuminated by the star, but because of the ship's speed, the illumination is on the side facing AWAY from the star, while the side facing the star is in a dark shadow. note: The (im)possibility of faster-than-light travel is irrelevant to this image. It is an isolated look at one specific aspect of faster-than-light travel, and admittedly ignores much of the theoretical physics that would come into play. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first entry to the competition since 1997, so first off, I'm so happy to have an image in the IRTC again. Not created in POV this time around, but a wonderful student discount made Maya very affordable. Everything in the image is fairly simple. I enjoy creating much more elaborately modelled spaceships, but I really didn't want to distract from the concept here. The sun is a simple sphere with some minorly fancy texturing. The stars are an imagemap background. The entire ship, glass and interior included, is created out of simple polygons. I was sad to see some of my nice modelling on the back of the ship and in its interior get lost to shadow, but thus is the price of faster-than-light travel. The small decals on the ship (mostly lost to shadow) were created in photoshop. That's about it. Next round I'll go full-out modelling crazy. For now, just a physics idea I came up with and thought was interesting, and it's good to be back.