TITLE: bean stalk to the stars
NAME: Johannes Ewers
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Johannes.Ewers@t-online.de
WEBPAGE: not yet
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: beans.jpg
ZIPFILE: beans.zip
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.

