EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com NAME: Glenn McCarter TOPIC: Elements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: "Construction and Destruction" COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/ RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 beta TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro (image maps; convert image to JPEG) RENDER MUSIC: The Chemical Brothers "Elektrobank" RENDER TIME: 10h 33m HARDWARE USED: Pentium-II/266 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Monday afternoon I remember it quite clearly. I was sitting in a small cafe inside the sixth-floor atrium of the Cinturon building, testing my new Pocket NanoAssembler(tm). It's a scaled-down atomic assembler, with on-board feedstocks and an 8cc chamber size. With it, I can make any object imaginable, one atom at a time. Anyway, the mini Assembler was working well, and I was having fun with it. Fooling around making "sugar-bots", teeny robots whose sole purpose in life was to stack-up sugar crystals. Something caught my eye, and I glanced out the window. I was astonished to see a huge robot attacking the Eiffel Tower! How could this be? Then I realized that it was just a (rather tasteless) advertisement for NanoCon. They were using their HoloMegaProjection technology (which can project huge 3D images visible from kilometers away) to project the faux tower and bot. It was all a gimmick to get people to buy their Assemblers. Their slogan flared up in the sky, "No Job Is Too Big... Or Too Small, For NanoCon!". I sighed, cleaned up the coffee spill, and went back to work. I spoke several commands into the machine. Minutes later there was a sharp hiss as the vaccuum seal was broken, and the lid pivoted upwards. Another batch of robots was complete. They have a special function: I'd never again have to clean up another coffee spill... ------------- This image can be viewed on two levels: 1. Oh My God! A giant robot is destroying the Eiffel Tower! 2. An illustration of nano-scales. Nanotechnology uses nano-scale "robots" to manipulate individual atoms. A typical iron atom measures about 0.1 nanometers, but do you know how small this really is? Can you see the small robot? (It's picking up a grain of sugar.) This robot is a little less than 2 millimeters tall. Call it "Sugar-bot". The Eiffel-size giant robot is 28000 times larger than Sugar-bot. And the Nano-bot (seen picking up a single atom on the NanoAssembler screen), is 28000 times SMALLER than the Sugar-bot. So, approximately, a nano-scale robot is to a grain of sugar, as a grain of sugar is to the Eiffel tower. Atoms are tiny! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: As this image shows everything from the miniscule to the gigantic, "scale" was the key factor in designing this scene. I first needed to decide which objects to portray: the very large (the Titanic? Hoover Dam? Manhattan?), and the very small (pinhead? dust? rice?). I settled upon the Eiffel Tower and sugar crystals. Both are instantly recognizable worldwide. Everyone knows their relative sizes. These provide a reference scale for the rest of the scene. The size of the robots next to them becomes obvious, familiar. The next crucial step was to arrange the scene. How to clearly show huge and tiny objects in the same view? I decided to magnify the small portion of the scene, with eyeglasses. This gives another scale reference to the scene, and has the additional benefit of drawing a "target" around the key area. See how the tiny robot is centered within the lens? Also, see how the shadows and lighting obscure the other eyeglass circle? This helps keep the viewer's attention in the right area. Modelling Notes Modelling is mostly straightforward POV-Ray CSG. A few objects in the scene are modified from previous projects, but everything else is "hand coded", specifically for this scene. The robots (and everything else) are included in the zipfile. Many of POV-Ray 3.1's new features are used in the scene. "Interior" and "media" are used in the tabletop, Arrays for the window lettering, and Macros are used extensively throughout the scene. For example, the opening angle of the eyeglass frames is specified via a macro. A more complex example: most of the girders in the Eiffel tower are specified with macros which define their thickness and length. The complete Eiffel tower has roughly 1,500 individual pieces. I first built it in the normal position, then modified it for the "falling apart" effect. The debris from the tower is a collection of girders in random positions. The coffee cup and saucer are lathe objects. The spilling coffee is a blob. I actually conducted experiments in spilling water from a glass, to understand the shapes involved! The NanoAssembler's (and sugar cube's) basic shape is a "rounded box", a shape I frequently use in scenes. The radii of the corners of this shape is easily adjustable via a macro. Texturing is achieved with handmade POV-Ray textures. The screen display on the NanoAssembler is a separate POV-Ray rendering of atoms made from blobs. Note this display is overlayed with a transparent "film" to give a plastic-like sheen to the screen. The tabletop also uses an image map (also made with POV-Ray) for its woven interior texture. For better realism, many of the textures in the scene are slightly reflective. Ok, enough explanations. I've got a few more ideas for projects to make with my new NanoAssembler... Glenn McCarter September 27, 2021