TITLE: "Construction and Destruction"
NAME: Glenn McCarter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: gmccarter@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/2006/
TOPIC: Elements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: construc.jpg
ZIPFILE: construc.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 beta

TOOLS USED: 

  Paint Shop Pro (image maps; convert image to JPEG)

RENDER MUSIC: The Chemical Brothers "Elektrobank"

RENDER TIME: 
    10h 33m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-II/266


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Monday afternoon
I remember it quite clearly.  I was sitting in a small cafe inside the
sixth-floor atrium of the Cinturon building, testing my new Pocket
NanoAssembler(tm).  It's a scaled-down atomic assembler, with on-board
feedstocks and an 8cc chamber size.  With it, I can make any object imaginable,
one atom at a time.  Anyway, the mini Assembler was working well, and I was
having fun with it.  Fooling around making "sugar-bots", teeny robots whose
sole purpose in life was to stack-up sugar crystals.

Something caught my eye, and I glanced out the window.  I was astonished to see
a huge robot attacking the Eiffel Tower!  How could this be?  Then I realized
that it was just a (rather tasteless) advertisement for NanoCon.  They were
using their HoloMegaProjection technology (which can project huge 3D images
visible from kilometers away) to project the faux tower and bot.  It was all a
gimmick to get people to buy their Assemblers.  Their slogan flared up in the
sky, "No Job Is Too Big... Or Too Small, For NanoCon!".  I sighed, cleaned up
the coffee spill, and went back to work.

I spoke several commands into the machine.  Minutes later there was a sharp hiss
as the vaccuum seal was broken, and the lid pivoted upwards.  Another batch of
robots was complete.  They have a special function:  I'd never again have to
clean up another coffee spill...


-------------

This image can be viewed on two levels:

1. Oh My God!  A giant robot is destroying the Eiffel Tower!

2. An illustration of nano-scales.  Nanotechnology uses nano-scale "robots" to
manipulate individual atoms.  A typical iron atom measures about 0.1
nanometers, but do you know how small this really is?

Can you see the small robot?  (It's picking up a grain of sugar.)  This robot is
a little less than 2 millimeters tall.  Call it "Sugar-bot".  The Eiffel-size
giant robot is 28000 times larger than Sugar-bot.  And the Nano-bot (seen
picking up a single atom on the NanoAssembler screen), is 28000 times SMALLER
than the Sugar-bot.  So, approximately, a nano-scale robot is to a grain of
sugar, as a grain of sugar is to the Eiffel tower.  Atoms are tiny!




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


As this image shows everything from the miniscule to the gigantic, "scale" was
the key factor in designing this scene.  I first needed to decide which objects
to portray: the very large (the Titanic?  Hoover Dam?  Manhattan?), and the
very small (pinhead?  dust?  rice?).  I settled upon the Eiffel Tower and sugar
crystals.  Both are instantly recognizable worldwide.  Everyone knows their
relative sizes.  These provide a reference scale for the rest of the scene. 
The size of the robots next to them becomes obvious, familiar.

The next crucial step was to arrange the scene.  How to clearly show huge and
tiny objects in the same view?  I decided to magnify the small portion of the
scene, with eyeglasses.  This gives another scale reference to the scene, and
has the additional benefit of drawing a "target" around the key area.  See how
the tiny robot is centered within the lens?  Also, see how the shadows and
lighting obscure the other eyeglass circle?  This helps keep the viewer's
attention in the right area.


Modelling Notes
Modelling is mostly straightforward POV-Ray CSG.  A few objects in the scene are
modified from previous projects, but everything else is "hand coded",
specifically for this scene.  The robots (and everything else) are included in
the zipfile.

Many of POV-Ray 3.1's new features are used in the scene.  "Interior" and
"media" are used in the tabletop, Arrays for the window lettering, and Macros
are used extensively throughout the scene.  For example, the opening angle of
the eyeglass frames is specified via a macro.  A more complex example: most of
the girders in the Eiffel tower are specified with macros which define their
thickness and length.

The complete Eiffel tower has roughly 1,500 individual pieces.  I first built it
in the normal position, then modified it for the "falling apart" effect.  The
debris from the tower is a collection of girders in random positions.
The coffee cup and saucer are lathe objects.  The spilling coffee is a blob.  I
actually conducted experiments in spilling water from a glass, to understand
the shapes involved!
The NanoAssembler's (and sugar cube's) basic shape is a "rounded box", a shape I
frequently use in scenes.  The radii of the corners of this shape is easily
adjustable via a macro.

Texturing is achieved with handmade POV-Ray textures.  The screen display on the
NanoAssembler is a separate POV-Ray rendering of atoms made from blobs.  Note
this display is overlayed with a transparent "film" to give a plastic-like
sheen to the screen.  The tabletop also uses an image map (also made with
POV-Ray) for its woven interior texture.  For better realism, many of the
textures in the scene are slightly reflective.  


Ok, enough explanations.  I've got a few more ideas for projects to make with my
new  NanoAssembler...

Glenn McCarter
September 27, 2021

