EMAIL: kosh@nesys.com NAME: Dave Merchant TOPIC: CHILDHOOD COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: BIG TOY COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: www.nesys.com RENDERER USED: Povray 3.01, Windows 95 TOOLS USED: POV-Ray 3.01, Adobe Photoshop 3.04 RENDER TIME: 44 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium-120, 16mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Childhood - my childhood to be exact. This image documents the single most memorable event of my childhood - a close encounter with a steam dinosaur. In this scene, about 1955, my kid brother and I watched a big steam crane / pile driver, "Driver No. 3", building a local water intake plant. I’ve changed the facts slightly - my dad worked during the week, and never got to see this machine when it was fired up, but it saved me having to come up with some women’s clothes and finishing my blobs human model for our mom, who was providing transportation that day. We were there because the water plant was being built right next to the swimming beach - note the lake in the background. Funny thing - I didn’t get in the water much that day! I was about 11 or 12 years old at the time. Since that time, the great beach has completely eroded away, and waves break against the valve building being constructed here. An unusual childhood? Not really. Prior to the sixties, computers, video games, and television, many kids, including myself, spent their free time at construction sites, railroad stations, and firehouses. There was always plenty to see, and if you were lucky, you might find a "steam rig" like this one for your listening pleasure. Back then, this was a rather typical childhood. The atmosphere was different, prior to the lawsuit explosion. Workers expected and welcomed visitors, and were happy to show off their work. In my case, I rode many locomotives (some steam), ran a couple of them, was in railroad yards, roundhouses, and on working docks, and was allowed up on and operated many kinds of construction equipment. My son has done many of the same things. When there was nothing going on, the dirt piles were ideal for war, cowboys, or king of the hill, or to just climb up and look down. Was it dangerous? Perhaps we had better survival skills then. Were we standing too close? Like I said, it was a different time. The crane is placing timber "floats" to avoid sinking into the soft sand. The engineer is reaching up for the main hoist throttle, while the ground man signals the moves to be made. In the background, a rough wooden form is being completed for the valve house, which is the only visible manifestation of a large underground and underwater construction project. The fireman is out on the walkway, since it’s hot in the cab, and the intermittent work being done this day doesn’t require constant firing. Supplying steam to a pile driver was a different matter! We also got to watch that operation, earlier in the day. Note the kitchen chairs on the veranda. This machine was as much an auditory experience as visual, as it had all the sounds of a medium sized steam locomotive. The forced draft on the boiler was more or less continual, with the air compressor (the crane apparently had air assisted controls) providing intermittent punctuation. The connecting rod brasses on the hoist engine were rather worn, so the engine clanked when it ran. Just about right for an impressionable 11 year old kid - I can still hear it. The sinister looking black framework laying in the background is a steam pile driver - for some reason, they were usually an intense black color. This machine was too big to be transported by road, which was no problem - the company moved it by barge. Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company is still in business, with the same color scheme, but more modern machines. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: - ABOUT THE MODEL This model is a reconstruction based on limited information and 40 year old memories. From specific design details, including the large horizontal boiler, starboard side operator’s position, and the need for a ground man to operate the steering clutches, it was tentatively identified as a Bucyrus or Bucyrus-Erie machine, in the 50-B to 65-B range. But there is considerable uncertainty to this - many companies in the US were capable of building a machine like this, and in fact GLD+D had repair shops which would have been up to the task of building one from scratch. Also, nearly every one of these machines was heavily customized, drawing from an extensive catalog of standard modules. Many good photos were available of several B-E 50-B shovels, but these differ somewhat from crane / pile driver configurations. Additionally, extensive photos were available of a large custom built steam crane / pile driver at a museum, and of many larger barge mounted steam cranes that continued in use until at least 1990. The known details were combined, and sized to fit. Compared to the 50-B shovel, the machinery deck was lengthened and widened to accommodate a large 3 drum winch instead of the single hoist drum of a shovel. The undercarriage length and width were increased in a typical adaptation - on shovels, a compact footprint is desired, at the expense of stability. Additionally, the A-frame was made higher for operation with longer booms. The hoist drums are large, to spool a great length of cable for caisson, tunnel, and dredge use. The fairleads in the A-frame to redirect the hoist cables are an archaic feature that were known to be present on the subject machine. When I started to work out the geometry, it became obvious that the flat winch deck required their use to prevent the cables from hitting the other drums or boom. The steep arch of the corrugated iron roof is typical. The use of large bogies in the undercarriage is questionable - this was a hallmark of large B-E machines of the time, but I think I remember that the machine had a conventional modern rail frame undercarriage. The boom hoist rigging is simplified on the model. Also, with research, it may turn out that the boiler diameter on the model is a bit small. I will probably change these items someday. An odd feature was a large brass hose outlet on the center base - apparently, the base served as a water tank. Due to the uncertainties, and the potential of obtaining better information in the future, everything is parameterized. This also allows animation. - ABOUT THE IMAGE This setup is in POV-Ray 3.01, all CSG. No modelers were used. I made some textures in Photoshop, but used standard POV procedural textures whenever possible. The sky, sand, lake, and wood grain are all standard POV textures, which I really like. The scene is a bit busy, but I made an attempt at a reasonable composition consistent with the actual events. I tried to use the junk in the foreground and the patch of empty sand in the center to pull the eye toward the kids and their dad. There are quite a few shadowless fill lights, plus the sun. Lighting isn’t my strong point. The overall light level is high, as it was at the beach, due to the reflective sand. The sand at this beach was actually very light, almost white, but I darkened it for the image, to keep from washing out everything else. I work with a monitor which has great saturation, so the image may be a bit too light on some monitors. The steam is just a basic "spherical dust" halo, stretched, with all the quality parameters set as low as I could get away with. Contrary to popular belief, a coal fired boiler normally didn’t put out much black smoke, unless it was being fired heavily, or a photographer requested it. The lake is simple turbulence, stretched lengthwise. The caterpillar treads and hoist gears were rendered solid in POV, but then turned into GIFs in Photoshop, and applied as textures in the final rendering. I developed the people specifically for this scene, using vector math. They are currently rather basic, but fully articulated, so they can be used in animations. I expect that they’ll be better by the next time they’re used. Via a render-time option, they can be rendered with clothes, from geometric shapes, or using blobs for people in shorter outfits, although I don’t have any clothes yet for the blobs version. Clothes and faces are textures created in Photoshop. A tricky part was in articulating the hoist and boom cables via vector math, so that the boom and hooks could be positioned and animated. The lacing of the tapered parts of the boom was also interesting. I had quite a bit of trouble with moire on the corrugated iron roof and the cables on the hoist drums, but didn't want to get into 3 day renders, so I finally just minimised it as much as possible. Object count is 1648. I wasted some effort developing a fast-rendering tree model with multiple vegetation styles, and then found there was no room in the composition to use any of them. So I used a few for the typical scrub vegetation normally found on beaches. The plant model is 2 nested hollow spherical shells, with a transparent leaf pattern GIF texture (done in Photoshop, of course). I used Photoshop to convert the image to JPEG, but did not do any other corrections. Additional images and background material are available at my web site: WWW.NESYS.COM/3d.html. I didn’t write a ZIP archive, but would be happy to discuss any questions. As for the origin of the title, take a look at WWW.BIGTOY.COM, another organization I belong to. The trademark of Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company is acknowledged. The trademark of Bucyrus - Erie Company is acknowledged.