EMAIL: lpurple@netcom.com NAME: Lance Purple TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Frank LLoyd Wright's "Mile High" Illinois Tower COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.01 for Windows TOOLS USED: perl (to generate roadNN.pov), xv (gamma correction/JPG conversion) RENDER TIME: 5.5 hours HARDWARE USED: 66 Mhz PC IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Commemorative plaque from the 528th floor observation deck of the Illinois Mile-High Tower. First proposed in 1959 by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 2009, the Mile High is the tallest habitable structure in the world. The most significant barriers to construction of this great Chicago monument were not structural materials or assembly techniques; in fact, it would have been possible to build it in 1959. What was lacking was the technology to provide such a tall building with elevator service! The introduction in the late 1990s of linear-induction elevators (such as Otis's Odyssey[TM] system) made it practical to transport hundreds of thousands of tenants up and down a single set of shafts, with spare elevator cabs waiting on horizontal sidings. The other major engineering challenge, wind loads, was met by the invention of the tuned mass damper. A massive weight moves back and forth under computerized control, to counteract any horizontal forces caused by wind gusts. As a result, the top floor will sway less than 50 cm during a 120 mph wind gust. The expected lifespan of the "Mile High" is at least 200 years. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: When I saw the topic, I decided to do FLW's Mile High Tower. Yes, I know it hasn't actually been built -yet-, but it was doable even with 1950s materials, and now that we have the linear-induction elevator and mass-damper technologies, it's economically feasible too. And this thing would -definitely- be a Great Engineering Achievement. I mean, look how tiny the Sears Tower and the Hancock Tower are next to it! To get the shoreline data, I downloaded the USGS 1:100000 scale Digital Line Graph files for the Chicago area, and converted the "Hydrography" data into prisms by hand. For the road network, I wrote a perl script to convert the USGS "Transportation:Roads" data into a triangle mesh. Next, I got a tourist map of Chicago which gave major building heights, and hand-modelled several dozen major skyscrapers, as boxes, cones, etc. and positioned them using coordinate data from the USGS file. I came up with some decent texture maps to look like lighted office-tower floors. Now it was time to model the Mile-High Tower. I had a diagram from an old Frank Lloyd Wright book which -appeared- to give accurate coordinates; but looked nothing like his perspective drawings when I rendered it. So I eyballed the measurements, and it came out looking great. The hardest part was filling up the ground plane. I wrote a set of loops to make a heightfield map by scattering small random buildings across downtown Chicago, and then masked out the roads in black. It took several tries to get the road grid aligned, so that I wouldn't have random buildings in the middle of the streets; and I'm still not 100% happy with it; but since I don't have a plat map of downtown Chicago it'll have to do. The major buildings are semi- accurately modelled anyway. Now that I had the main scene modelled, I wanted to work in all the dedications FLW gave in the margin of the sketches. So I used an orthographic projection and lots of text objects to make the text plaques, and to paste them next to (and even covering) the main panorama, on a plane of parchment texture. NOTE: All image maps used in this scene were generated by POV. Nothing came from any paint programs (in case all of the text makes you suspicious). It's all POV primitives.