TITLE: 'Jet-ostrich liftoff'
NAME: Xavier Manget
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: 100620.2112@compuserve.com
WEBPAGE: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Xavier_Manget
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: autr6.jpg
ZIPFILE: autr6.zip
RENDERER USED: POVRAY 3.0 (MS-DOS & Windows versions)
TOOLS USED: Moray 2.5, Blob Sculptor 2.0, Terrain Maker 1.0, Paint Shop Pro
4.10

RENDER TIME: 6h 30mn (with POV 3 MS-DOS, 800x600 +A0.3)
HARDWARE USED: PC 486 DX2/66, 24 megs RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

'Flight'... Birds... Birds flying happily in the sky...  Well, not all
 birds, Mother Nature is sometimes cruel. Can you think of a more
 revolting injustice, than the fact that some birds (such as ostriches)
 are unable to fly? I really felt I had to do something for these poor
 birds.

Well, this 'something' is an adaptation to the ostriches' anatomy of
 some machines known as "rocket-belts"; the first rocket-belt was made 
 by Bell Aerosystem, and first took off outdoors successfully in the
 early 60s. Rocket-belts are powered by hydrogen pexoxyde, stored in
 tanks carried on the pilot's back; hydrogen peroxide reacts with
 silver in a catalyst chamber, which produces immediately a lot of
 hot steam and sufficient thrust for liftoff... (those interested in
 the subject may have a look at http://www.prysm.net/~jnuts and
 http://www.rocket-belt.com)


One of the difficulties in rocket-belt design, is dealing with stability
 (position of the thrust in relation with the center of gravity of the
 pilot). Of course, the ostrich version was designed with these issues in
 mind. The ostrich can change pitch, speed and direction by carefully
 positioning its legs and neck. The throttle is controlled by a lever
 fixed on a wing (unfortunately the picture shows the left side of an 
 ordinary right-handed ostrich, so you can't see all the details of
 the throttle mechanism, but only a part of the throttle cable...

The main difficulty is now to find a clever enough and adventurous enough
 ostrich... 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All object and textures were designed especially for this competition.

This image was not postprocessed (except for the signature and JPEG
 compression).

The bodies and heads of the ostriches were modelled in Blob Sculptor. The
 necks and wings are made with Bezier patches, modelled in Moray. The
 legs, feathers and other details are CSG objects.

Paint Shop Pro and Terrain Maker were used for height-fields and bump
 maps.

The rocket-belt was modelled with CSG objects in Moray.

The grass is a single mesh of 10,000 triangles, it was randomly generated
 in a POV 3 'while' loop, following a given distribution.