EMAIL: djconnel@flash.net NAME: Daniel Connelly TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Ice COUNTRY: United States WEBPAGE: http://www.flash.net/~djconnel/ RENDERER USED: Ray Dream 5.0.2, Bryce 3D (sky only) TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro RENDER TIME: 30 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 266MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Two classical engineering subjects are the bridge and the human-powered vehicle. This image combines the two in a novel way, the bridge spanning two floating ice structures, each marked with a geometric simplicity fundamentally characteristic of engineered, as opposed to naturally occurring, works. How or why this scene would occur doesn't seem terribly relevant :). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Extensive use was made of the free-form modeller in Ray Dream. Most notable was the bridge, a series of 200 rectangular prisms connected with three-twine twisted "ropes" (mostly obscured). It was laid out flat, then globally deformed to sag. The spikes and looped ropes completed the structure. The planks were textured with the Ray Dream "wood" function. The bike was rendered using an extruded "body" and two wheels consisting of a rim, tire, and 3 "Spinergy"-like banded spoke pairs. The body was textured using reflection and color maps generated in Paint Shop Pro. The water was a simple infinite plane textured using one of Ray Dream's water texture. There is room for improvement here. The sky was quickly generated using Bryce, then included as a backdrop and background for the final rendered image. The ice are cube primitives to which a combination of a simple geometric pattern from the Ray Dream CD was applied (resolution was tripled using Paint Shop Pro). The near ice was done a bit differently than the far one. The far one received an additional Ray-Dream generated fractal pattern to the bump channel, while the color channel received a blue-white version of the geometric pattern. The near ice had uniform color, but received the geometric pattern, 30x magnified, applied to the reflection and bump channels. It took a substantial amount of trial and error to get these correct. The sign was generated via a text object applied over an extruded rectangular prism. Both received wood texture maps to the color and bump maps. The color map for the letters was shaded blue. The sign post was implemented as a cylinder textured using the Ray Dream "rusted iron" texture. Finally, the light was generated using the usual distant light source. Clearly there is room for substantial creativity here.