TITLE: Giants
NAME: Dave Merchant
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kosh@nesys.com
WEBPAGE: www.nesys.com
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: giants.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1e Watcom

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for JPEG conversion and image map creation

RENDER TIME: 
    3 hours 29 min 16 secs at AA=0.05 and intervals = 6

HARDWARE USED: 
    P400, 128 mb RAM, NT4

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Visitors to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan are confronted by
a huge steam locomotive. The signs say that it is a Chesapeake and Ohio H-8
"Allegheny", a 2-6-6-6, and that it hauled 160 car coal trains over its
namesake mountains. But as it sits there, cold and shiny, on a parquet floor
in a museum that also features fine antique furniture and Stradivarii,
it is hard to imagine that this mass of iron once was alive, or believe
that it was capable of passenger train speeds.

The subject "Unbelievable" first conjures up science fiction, or the distant
past, while this is a monster of the recent past.

Some of the unbelievable facts:

The engine alone, without the tender, weighed about the same as a loaded 747.

The engine weighed about 772,000 pounds, the tender about 440,000 pounds.
Together, the weight was well over a million pounds.

In road testing with a dynamometer, 7500 net drawbar horsepower was seen at
peak, and nearly 7000 on a continuous basis. To do this, the horsepower at
the cylinders was significantly higher than this.

The Allegheny weighed the same as the famous Union Pacific Big Boy, but was
denied the "world's heaviest" credit for most of its lifetime - they were
initially designed to weigh much less, but "feature creep" added over
30,000 pounds to the design weight. Since engine crews were paid by weight,
the actual figure was kept a secret for many years. When the engine was
reweighed later, the builder was forced to pay a very large monetary
settlement to the railroad, reportedly several million dollars.

These engines were not fully utilized in their normal coal service. They
were designed to be high speed engines, but were usually limited to coal
drag speeds. Train length was limited to 160 cars due to siding lengths
and coupler strength, rather than the true cabability of the locomotives.
In some cases, they were used on fast freight and heavy passenger trains,
where they performed brilliantly.

The Allegheny was a direct descendant of the Nickel Plate 2-8-4 I did last
year, but all major dimensions were increased 1.5 times.

To keep the rigid wheelbase reasonable, the Alleghenies had two engines
under one boiler, with a hinge between them. As a result, these big
engines could traverse tight curves easily.

The big pipes supply steam, and carry away the exhaust. Steam to the front
engine first went to a dividing valve above the rear cylinders. Half was
used in the rear cylinders, while the remainder went forward through a
pipe inside the front engine frame. This arrangement simplified the
swivel steam joints.

In this scene, the 1643 gets a ride on a turntable, demonstrating another
of the peculiarities of these engines. They were built with a 113 foot
wheelbase, to just barely fit on the standard 115 foot turntables, so the
front and rear platforms overhung the turntables significantly. Getting
them positioned on the turntable was quite tricky. The 1631, sitting on
a storage track, is just barely clear of the overhang zone.

The rail joints near the ends of the pit lead rails are typical.
The ends of the rails were subject to repeated impacts as engines moved
off the turntable, and the joints facilitated frequent replacement of these
high-wear areas.

Although I grew up around the Nickel Plate 2-8-4's, I never saw an
Allegheny in operation, even though they came within 150 miles of my house.
I recently encountered a man who had been around them, and asked him what
his impression of them was. One word: "BIG!"



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is all CSG.

Due to the family design relationship with the 2-8-4, I had originally
intended to reuse many components from the previous model, but found that
I was only able to use the bell and the centers of the drivers. Over the
last year, I have learned to structure components much more efficiently,
so was able to produce a much more complex model with fewer objects.

A steam locomotive is made up many textures of metal. The large components
are rough castings, others are steel plate, while the jackets on the boiler,
air pumps, and large steam pipes are sheet metal wrapped around the
thick insulation. Various textures were used to represent this. Note that
the curved steam pipes are covered with segmented jacketing.

Wheel rims and side rods are nickel steel, which retains a silver color.

Whistle and bell are brass, although they were often just steel painted black.

Reflections are tricky - although the steel jackets get dirty, an underlying
glossiness often shows through.

Lights are close to being "available light", but I fudged the positions
a bit to fill in some of the details. There are two colors of light used -
a slightly orange color to represent oil lanterns, and a very pale yellow
for incandescents. Both types of light have fade distance applied.

There are no light sources in the headlights or number boxes. Instead,
they are concave, and pick up and reflect the ambient light.

The ground is a height field, with a crackle texture to simulate cinders.

I made custom textures for the glossy metal, the wood grain of the ties,
and the sky. I experimented with a sunset, but got mixed reactions from
my family, so decided to go with a simple night sky.

Piping was done with a set of macros I developed.

Steam is interior/media. This function behaves strangely in artificial
light - in daylight illumination, the same parameters give a billowing
dense, dark gray smoke. I twiddled parameters to get something decent,
but it isn't what I had planned to have.

That's my animated blobs guy, who is getting better, but still not quite
ready for prime time. I put him in the scene to show the size of the engine.
He is 5' 10" tall. He is holding a lantern, which illuminates him. I made
a nice lantern model, which I intended to use with another guy in the
foreground, but the picture composition didn't work out.

The sign says "SAFETY FIRST". It is painted sheet steel, with rust streaks.
The black letters are cut out of steel and riveted to the white background.
They were done with the TTF function, as were the numbers on the engines.

I used a moderately wide angle lens, to emphasize the engine size.

The only image maps are the staybolts on the firebox.

Object count is 5138.