TITLE: The Sunflower Tower NAME: Simon Lemieux COUNTRY: Canada, Quebec EMAIL: xilo_m@hotpop.com WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/simonlemieux/ TOPIC: Architecture COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: snflwrtw.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Home-made programs, GIMP, Emacs RENDER TIME: 2 hours 6 minutes 20.0 seconds (7580 seconds) HARDWARE USED: PentiumIII 450, 256M RAM and 512M swap (virtual memory) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Sunflower Tower is a gigantic structure with an extremely queer architecture. The Sunflower itself at the top of the tower is made of bronze but painted with gold to reflect the sun on the city below. The Sunflower cannot bend to look at the sun like a real sunflower, though it is placed so the sun is never behind it and the sun can always reflect on the sunflower's surface. The tower is made of some special metal alliage that makes the structure extremely solid but still very flexible. The tower reminds the people below that life starts at the bottom with four Nucleotides; the Adenine, the Thymine, the Guanine and the Cytosine. These are the four letters of the genetic code encrypted in the ADN. And the tower is only made of these four metal nucleotides, in the same double helix way as it is in reality (with some artistic exceptions). The ADN segment that was taken, is the one responsible for both creativity and imagination in the human brain as of today's researches... The ADN structure rise up far over all the buildings, reaching the sky and merging into a giant sunflower. Merging into the representation of the living plant that salutes the sun all day. The plant that knows that without the sun, there would be no life on earth. The architects that created this building made something incredible with this tower, for the double helix structure behave exactly like a spring; when the wind blows on the sunflower's structure, the ADN bends and absorbs the force of the wind. This structure is said to be the most solid building on earth, it will still be erect and standing after the biggest tornado, it will still be erect and standing after the biggest earthquake... it will still be erect and standing when life will be totally extinguished on earth! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I downloaded data from a Protein Data Bank to get a real double helix. I had to write myself a program that could read a file.pdb and make something for povray with it... (along the way I ended making an OpenGL molecule viewer). Then when I had the double helix, I started programming with povray, building the shapes of the leaves, the flower... the buildings (made of polygons), the CSG cars, the people at the base, the four nucleotides at the base. And the textures are made with GIMP, very simply... I found out about the current topic on april 20, that day I gathered information on ADN to know if it was a good concept and when I had enough, I started right away! Since I work 8hours a day and I sleep 8 hours a day and the 8 hours left are used for other stuff, I only had 3 hours a day for this project and two holidays, so time was extremely short and I had to keep my ideas clean of utopia... I had to make my scene look as nice as possible, but still make sure I could do it, and make sure it was possible. It was a very big planification fun, I learned a few things about 3D geometry (for the ADN structure) along the way and I also learned a few things about povray and most of all myself... This is the very first image that I submit as a final image (though, if you go to my website, you will see some updates (with full quality, etc...)). Unfortunately, I would have liked to include a .zip file with all my source code and my textures (which are pretty small), but time is very short, I have to leave for the job and I will only be able to do this after the deadline... So you will be able to get it on my website. Thank you very much, Simon Lemieux ( aka Xilo Musimene )