TITLE: Babylon
NAME: Adrian White (Taff)
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: Adrian.R.White@usa.net
WEBPAGE: None as yet
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: babylon.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    RayDream Studio 5 - Adaptive

TOOLS USED: 
    RayDream Studio 5 and Poser 3

RENDER TIME: 
    Approx 8hrs

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 133MHz, 64MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Landmarks.  What to choose?  There are so very many, in the real world alone... 
Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar II would have been a wonder to behold. 
Herodotus: "Babylon surpasses in splendor  any city in the world."  Archaeology
disputes many of the claims made by ancient historians and writers but the
evidence still makes the Babylon of about 600BC truly awesome, if for nothing
other than magnitude of the structures.  The contender for Tower of Babel, a
ziggurat to the god Marduk has a base measuring 90x90m (300x300ft) and also
apparently reached some 90m to the heavens.  It was topped by a temple to the
god reputedly some 24x20x15m (80x70x50ft) and containing an immense solid gold
statue of the god.  The route to the temple was via the Processional Way  some
20m (70ft) wide by 900m (3000ft), which was inscribed with dedications to the
god Marduk.  This passing through the Ishtar Gate.  Each of these structures
were said to have be covered with blue ceramic tiles.  The Ishtar gate and
Processional way also had reliefs of bulls, lions and dragons.  Then there are
the possibly fabled Hanging Gardens, built by the king for his homesick wife. 
Strabo: " The gardens  consists of vaulted terraces raising one above the other
and resting upon cub-shaped pillars.  These were hollow and filled with earth
to allow trees of the largest size to be planted.  The pillars, vaults and
terraces are constructed of baked brick and asphalt."

My image attempts to show these three features and the sheer scale of them.  The
route on the left is the Processional Way approaching the Ishtar Gate.  The
structure to the right is the Hanging Gardens (in the early stages of
planting!).  The big thing at the back, looking a bit too blue and feature less
is the "Tower of Babel".

A sad representation even of the verifiable splendour of Babylon of that time
and my initial plan for the image but I suppose it is my first attempt.  I will
be modifying the image after the competition date to something approximating
the true magnificence.  Thwarted by a fig palm, the ones in the image are last
minute shadows of my first attempt before realising that making them
"vegenomically" correct was not only pointless but created a file that was 9MB
in native format and a whopping 900MB when exported to DXF.  (I'd originally
started the image in Bryce 3D and was drawing objects in RayDream.)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

In the end the whole image was constructed in a rushed 5 days in RayDream
Studio5 after the problem with the palms.  Most items are build simply from
cube primitives.  The Hanging Gardens (the structure with the palms) was
created by using the free form modeler by extruding a cross-section,  The Tower
of Babel was constructed from a spiral arrangement of cuboid primitives with a
slope cut off the top.  The figures (yes there are a couple just to show some
scale) are from Poser 3.  Finally the palms were constructed by duplicating a
frond with offsets rotating around an axis and incrementing the "angle of
dangle" with each successive frond to create the ball like head of a fig palm. 
The frond itself is constructed from a number of free form modeler extrusions. 
Unlike the originals these are simple rectangular cross sections.  There are so
few palms in a sadly sparce garden, simply due to the file size of the plant
objects I created.  Even these "semi-skimmed palms" pushed my system to its
processing limits and me to the edge of patience waiting for the screen to
refresh.  Any tips I get for reducing the side of such mesh objects will be
gratefully received.