NAME:    Yannick KIRSCHHOFFER
EMAIL:   alcibiade@alcibiade.org
WEBPAGE: http://www.alcibiade.org/
COUNTRY: France

TITLE:   This Strange Engine
TOPIC:   Old Technology

RENDERER USED: Megapov 1.0
HARDWARE USED: 1GHz AMD Athlon / 128Mb Ram
RENDER TIME:   60 hours

TOOLS USED: 
		- vim: Text editor for all parts
		- gimp: for heightfields and textures creation,
				signature and jpeg conversion
		- Rune's Particle System
		


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Emotions are what makes us advance... Our feelings are the
engine that makes us all alive... and thus are the oldest
technology on earth !

This is inspired by a photograph featured on Marillion's album
'This Strange Engine'. Marillion has always been one of my
favourite bands and this enigmatic engine on the cover has
made me think about it many times...

For me it is clearly a metaphor in which the engine is the
human beeing, and the heart is the source of energy that makes
this cold mechanic alive...

We are alive because of love...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I already started to work on the engine CSG many months ago,
but left it as a work in progress since then... But when I
saw the IRTC topic during january, I don't know why but I
immediately thought about this again...

So I got back to work...

Basically, everything is done using a text editor and CSG.
The wall is a set of isosurfaces covered by a heightfield.
The ground is a heightfield too. Crates are created with
superellipsoids and the cloth on the left has been done
using cloth simulation in megapov.

For the fire and smoke, I was first experimenting with
complex media structures...
While I was working on this, I discovered Rune's Particle
System, and it was sooooo coooool that I couldn't resist
using it in this scene... So that's how the smoke and
fire effects are produced in the final version.


COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.