TITLE: The Yerkes Observatory
NAME: Michael Hough
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: AmaltheaJ5@aol.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/amaltheaj5
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: yerkes.jpg
ZIPFILE: yerkes.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.02

TOOLS USED: 
    Lparser, POV-Ray for Windows 3.02, Ray Dream Studio 5, Paint Shop
Pro

RENDER TIME: 
    20 hours, 3 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    PentiumII 300


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


 For those of you who aren't astronomy buffs, the Yerkes Obseratory houses the
largest rafractor telescope in the world. It is 40 inches (120 centimeters) in
diameter, the largest size possible for technical reasons involving the support
of the glass.  I figured I had two choices to go about making this; concentrate
on the telescope or the building.  I chose the building because I think of it
as the glue that holds the whole thing together. 

 The telescope itself is a marvel of engineering.  A huge floor suspended by
wires (which had collapsed right after it was built) had to be built around it
so no vibrations would be transferred to the telescope by astronomers walking
around it.  The big dome is opened at dusk to allow the temperature inside of
the building to equalize with the outside air.  While the telescope is in use,
the dome will follow the rotation of the earth.

 I was truly awed by the size and detail of the architecture the first time I
saw it.  I hope this image has in some was captured that.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


 It took me awhile to decide between this and a large dam I used to frequent in
New York. I did some tests in RDS with Yerkes and knew right away that's what I
wanted to do.  The file quickly grew too large for RDS to handle, so I turned
to POV's excellent booleans to complete it.  I used a great deal of CSG and
while loops, declaring piece after piece using difference and union along the
way, then spinning them around to create the windows, columns, ect...The dome
was the one thing I kept from RDS. I converted it to a mesh using crossroads
and a little hand editing.  The base of the dome is a superellipsoid, a
primitive I find myself using more and more lately. 

I made the trees with Lparser.  I modified them just a little and created them
as dxf files which I converted to POV using crossroads again. I made a few
changes to the files, including changing the branches and removing the unions
that crossroads creates and replacing it with mesh.  Each tree is actually two
trees combined after moving in different ways, which I found gave a more
natural look and 'fullness' to them.  

The grass is made up of a thousand or so duplicates of a smaller patch of grass
made in RDS. I think it looks better than a image and bump mapped plane I had
before.  The sky was made using a sky_sphere and two planes, with a little
ground fog thrown in to lighten the horizon a little better.  The stars are
from Chris Colefax's galaxy.inc, and the moon is made up of two dics, one with
an image of the moon on it and the other an onion pattern to give the halo.

I used a normal y gradient with a slope map for the domes and a normal quilted
pattern to get the look of bricks around the building.  The brick pattern on
the top section of the smaller dome is an image_map created with POV using the
brick pattern, which I wrapped around the building using map_type 1.  I was
able to get the transparency right with the moon.gif I used by sorting the
palette by luminence in PSP and then using a while loop to set the transparency
for the last 100 or so colors in the palette.

The railing is probably the most complex CSG object in the scene.  I created it
by rotating some boxes and cylinder around in a while loop, and then used
intersection with a cylinder with a hole cut out to get the right curve to
them.

I'm sure I left a few things out.  I included the source, but had to omit a
great deal that is needed to render the image (tree meshes, images_maps),
because they simply take up too much memory.  It is heavily commented for
anyone interested in anything I did (actually to help me keep track of
things;).

-Mike