TITLE: Centre Pompidou
NAME: Philippe Moseley
COUNTRY: Wales, United Kingdom
EMAIL: philippemoseley@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~philippemoseley/philippe                %20moseley/index.html

TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard Raytracing Competition copyright.
JPGFILE: pompidou.jpg
ZIPFILE: pompidou.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio MAX scanline renderer

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio MAX 1.1, Poser 1

RENDER TIME: 
    four and a half hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 300MHz, 96Mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The structure of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
I wanted to avoid the obvious 'great engineering' of huge skyscrapers and
suspension bridges. The genius of this engineering is in the detail.
I also wanted to avoid the photorealism so common now in computer graphics, and
try deliberately to make the image look artificial.
The really interesting thing about raytracing is not in imitating nature but in
creating new visual possibilities.
The image basically shows a typical portion of the structure of the building,
which is made of tubular steel pipes connected with cast steel nodes.
The crucial part of the structure is the 'gerberette', the large cast steel arms
of which there are several in the image, which pivot vertically and accommodate
movement.
I added a glass version of Rodin's 'Thinker' sculpure in the foreground partly
to give scale, partly to give the image some deep meaning, and partly to jazz
it up a bit.
The wavy poster illustrates one of the fundamental reasons for the Pompidou
Centre's form: it acts as a giant billboard in the centre of Paris.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The steel was rendered using three main materials: two different bumpy maps with
added noise, and a 50% reflective map for the shiny pipes.
The glass statue is a dark red colour, but because of its reflective surface
this mixes with the blue of the sky. I also placed a large
green plane behind the viewer to give the statue's and pipes' colour some depth,
otherwise everything would have been blue.
The shaft of light is simple in 3D MAX, it's just a volumetric light beam.
Overall I used this and one other spotlight, and one omni light for fill.
The image would have taken half an hour to render but for all the reflection
maps in the pipes. I tried to apply a refract map to the statue so light would
bend
as it passed through, but couldn't get this to work.
I drew the structure from photos and some very small engineering drawings I have
in a book at home. The gerberette arms were made using boolean subtractions,
which is
probably not the most efficient way of doing it (maybe lofting would have been
better). The statue was made in Poser (very easy) and then imported as a dxf
file into MAX.
The poster is just a flat plane with wave and ripple modifiers applied to it,
and a map added.