EMAIL: Johannes.Ewers@t-online.de NAME: Johannes Ewers TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: bean stalk to the stars COUNTRY: Germany WEBPAGE: not yet RENDERER USED: povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, sPatch 1.5, Photshop 4 used for gamma correction RENDER TIME: 32 min HARDWARE USED: Celeron 433, 128 MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Travel to the stars has always been a dream of mankind. But space travel by rockets is prohibitively expensive. There is only one alternative to leave earth field of gravity; the space elevator. A satellite in a geo-synchronous orbit carries a fiber that is anchored to earth's surface at the equator. But there is no material known with sufficient strength to link grondstation and satellite. Until now! A breakthrough in molecular genetics and bio-engineering provides the solution; bean stalks. Genetically modified beans are strong enough to grow until they reach an orbital height. Of course, the bean stalks are much bigger than nomal beans. For security reasons, they are grown in large pots on small islands in the pacific ocean. There is a slight disadvantage; bean stalks have a rough, unregular surface. Multi-leged crawlers are used to climb the stalks and carry containers to the stars. Can you believe that? DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All modeling was done with Moray 3.1. The tool was especially useful for handling complex, hierarchical structured objects. Highly recommended! The bean stalk was modeled as a "chain" of different segments like a railway track. The segments were created in sPatch. Modelling started with three vertical, parallel tubes. The tubes were twisted to look like an organic structure. Top and bottom ends were turned against each other by 360 degrees so that segments could be put together without breaks. The sPatch objects were imported into Moray through a plugin filter. The leafs were created from a bezier patch with an image map plus bump map. The image map is applied with a little bit of transparency. The Sun is created with the Moray plugin for Nathan Kopps LensFlare includes. Two additional lights are placed to brighten the shadows.