EMAIL: rdx_irtc@warlordsofbeer.com NAME: Peter Duthie TOPIC: Architecture COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Spatial Crunch COUNTRY: Australia WEBPAGE: http://art.warlordsofbeer.com/ RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 (win2k for development, linux for render) TOOLS USED: Text editors, ImageMagick (for conversion to jpeg), custom Perl script (for the distributed render) RENDER TIME: 51714 seconds (14.4 hours) 525MB peak memory HARDWARE USED: Dual Xeon 1.8GHz, Dual Pentium III 1GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Even in space, it can get pretty crowded. The purpose of This image is to illustrate the idea that the future will likely be a densely populated place and although clever architecture and new frontiers may help alleviate this to some extent, the problem is none the less inescapable and will follow humanity no matter where it goes. The space station in the foreground is of a design commonly seen in film and literature, consisting of a rotating outer ring whose centripedal force simulates artifical gravity. The buildings contained within the space station are mostly meant to resemble those constructed in the late 20th / early 21st century, however there are some differences. The planet in the background is of course Earth, and the portion of it shown is a reference to current events. How does this relate to the topic? Within the image are three layers of architecture, embedded within one another. The contemporary high rise architecture is embedded within the futuristic space station architecture, which itself is embedded within the architecture of the universe, the Earth, the Sun, and the stars. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The image was constructed entirely with Povray CSG objects. The natural architecture consists of spheres. The Earth is a sphere mapped with an image map and a bump map of the real thing from http://www.space-graphics.com/earthphoto.htm, with the atmosphere simulated using a slightly larger transparent sphere filled with scattering media. The Sun consists of two emmitting media filled spheres, one for the more intense core, and another depicting the gas and radiance issuing from it. The stars were textured on to the inside of a very large hollow sphere, using the standard Povray starfield combined with a bozo pattern to induce a clustering effect. The space station architecture consists of tori and cylinders, combining metallic chrome, glassy, and 'NASA white' materials to achieve the desired look. The buildings are mostly constructed from angular shapes such as boxes, cylinders and cones, but there are some spheres and tori thrown in there as well. The buildings are scaled to a randomly selected size, textured with a randomly selected texture from a candidate list, then translated and rotated to a randomly selected place on the space station floor. Lighting comes from three different areas: The sun, the rocket ship exhaust, and a ring of spotlights above the buildings. I decided against using radiosity, as there was little noticable difference with it turned on due to the darkness of the background. To render the scene, I wrote a perl script that renders the image into thin strips seperately on each machine, and then reassembles them when all parts are completed in order to fully utilise the two dual CPU machines I have. My perl script should scale well enough to use in larger rendering clusters if I can aquire more hardware in the future! The .zip file included with my entry contains the full source to my image, minus the Earth image and bump maps, which can be obtained at the space-graphics.com URL mentioned above. This is my first IRTC entry, and I've had enough fun making this image that I'm sure it won't be my last!