EMAIL: jerry@hoboes.com NAME: Jerry Stratton TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Broken Bridges COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/ RENDERER USED: POV-RAY 3.1d TOOLS USED: ClarisWorks 4 RENDER TIME: 51 hours 7 minutes 45 seconds plus about an hour HARDWARE USED: Blue and White Macintosh G3/350 MHz, 64 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: When I was in Richmond, Virginia last fall (wandering from bar to bar in Northern Virginia and the Shenandoah) I stopped at Hollywood Cemetery. A number of graves had both United States and Confederate flags recently placed on them. They were those little flags you'll get for parades, with flagpoles about 8 inches long and the flag probably three by four inches at most. The flags were lying on the ground at the graves, and in each case the US flag had a snapped pole. I found that to be an emotionally charged image. While going through a book on the Confederacy for a book I'm writing, I ran across a picture of a picture of a bridge in Bridgeport, Tennessee, that had had both ends cleanly destroyed. It was an intact bridge that you couldn't use to cross over from either end, because it didn't have either end. I feel that those two images are a powerful statement on how our history shapes our present, and I've tried to combine them in my submission. I cleaned up the bridge a little bit to emphasize its intact but non-joining nature, while at the same time adding some debris to make it clear that this bridge was destroyed recently. I changed the 'toy' flags into battle flags. (Those were the battle flags used by the federal forces and by the army of northern Virginia.) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The bridge's support pillars are four clipped planes slanted inwards with the POV brick texture added. The texture has two layers: the bricks on the bottom, and some dirt covering it partially. I originally used a prism for the pillars, but that meant layers of mortar would occasionally be too large. I considered building them brick by brick, but the use of the brick pattern to modify the normal worked amazing well, even on closeup. (You can turn off the fog to see it.) The water is a reflective gray plane modified with a moderately turbulent gradient x sine wave. I was originally going to use POV to turn the gradient x sine wave into a height field, but it turned out not to be necessary. The water looks great as is. There is a sandy plane beneath the partially transparent water plane. The land is made up with blobs. The near bank is a collection of spherical blobs combined with cylindrical blobs, making the bank terraced, simulating different levels of water in the past. The far bank is simply a string of spherical blobs. The grassy texture is a combination of ripples and wrinkles. The sandy texture is just wrinkles. The mounds around each pillar are also a random collection of spherical blobs from 'mound' macro. There are two fogs in the scene: a low-lying fog over the water, and a beach fog filling up the depressions on the beach. Both are made with media in transparent container objects. The water fog is the combination of gradient y and bozo, making patches of fog hanging just above the water. The beach fog combines the cylindrical pattern with bozo, and then is stretched in the x direction. The bridge uses a bit of geometry to make the lacing match up but otherwise is nothing special. The flags use layered textures to make the flag pattern, with an added layer for soot. Only the stars are image maps. (I took the star from ClarisWorks 4.) The flags are made up of a union of triangles (thanks to Misha Moldavskiy for getting me started on triangles). I created a macro for making flags; there is a competing sine wave in the x direction and the y direction, and I modified the damper on and the frequency of the sine wave for each flag until it basically fit on the ground. I still need to get the macro to modify the texture for the waviness of the flag, but I decided that it was better to give the computer more time to render than to work out the math on how to modify the triangles and patterns for something that wasn't going to be obvious beneath the fog and through the focal blur anyway. The sky is pretty much just from POV's skies.inc, with the colors modified slightly to make it look more like a wet morning. The time given is for the last 400 lines. The first 200 lines took from an hour to two hours, I'm not sure which, before (a) the computer crashed, (b) someone in the office was playing with it or (b) I screwed up. (The first 200 lines were much faster because there is no fog in the sky.) Jerry