TITLE: spirit
NAME: Bernd Sieker
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: bsieker@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
WEBPAGE: --

TOPIC: history
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: spirit.jpg
ZIPFILE: spirit.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blue Moon Rendering Tools 2.4.0.3 (2.4c)
         (http://www.bmrt.org/)


TOOLS USED: 
    mops
            (http://www.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~rschultz/mops/) for
            modedlling

            The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) for making the texture and
            adding copyright tag to the final image



RENDER TIME: 
    about 34 hours.


HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 412 MHz, 128 MB RAM, NetBSD-1.4_BETA


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  
  Nothing particular exciting; this image shows the Spirit of St.
  Louis, the Ryan aircraft of Charles Lindbergh, on its flight acress
  the Atlantic from New York to Paris. It is believed that this flight
  and Lindbergh's following PR campaign in the US was historically
  very important for the development of commercial aviation.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  All modelling was done with mops, although still in beta stage this
  modeller is already quite capable. It produces RIB (RenderMan
  Interface Bytestream) output suitable for BMRT and PRMan.

  Rendering was done with BMRT 2.4.0c.


  GEOMETRY
  ~~~~~~~~
  Most of the geometry consists of NURB patches that were created
  using the "Build From Curves" function in mops. The engine cylinders
  are mostly created from CSG objects and some "sweep" NURB objects
  for the fuel and exhaust pipes, although these are not clearly
  visible in the final image.

  The sea under the plane is a simple bilinear patch, the wave
  patterns on it are created by a displacement shader.


  SHADERS
  ~~~~~~~
  This time I did not write any custom shaders but could get along
  find with only more or less 'standard' shaders that can be found on
  the web. RenderMan shaders are small programs written in the
  'RenderMan Shading Language', where almost anything in texturing and
  deforming geometry is possible.

  I used one custom-painted image map to project the Label on the
  front part of the aircraft's fuselage.


  RENDERING
  ~~~~~~~~~
  The image was rendered using Larry Gritz' splendid Blue Moon
  Rendering Tools, using a volume shader for the atmosphere effects,
  two area light sources, motion blue and radiosity. The latter is
  barely visible in the resulting image, but for some scenes it can
  greatly improve realism.

  Peak memory usage of the renderer during rendering was only 28 MB.