TITLE: Bluebird V
NAME: Bob Chmilnitzky
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jjaguar@worldnet.att.net
WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~chmilnir
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bluebird.jpg
ZIPFILE: bluebird.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3a, HamaPatch 2.9, Paint Shop Pro 5, JPEG Optimizer 3.01.

RENDER TIME: 
    5 hours 15 minutes 8 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6-2 300mhz, 320 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


As a pair of seagulls scramble to safety, Sir Malcom Campbell starts a
high-speed run in the Bluebird V.  On March 7, 1935, Campbell and the Bluebird
set a new official land speed record of 276.710 mph in the flying mile.  The
smooth, wide, hard-packed sands of Daytona Beach, Florida made for ideal
conditions and was the location of many speed record attempts from 1905 through
the mid-1930's.  Bluebird was 29 feet long, weighed 12,000 lbs, and was powered
by a 2,500 hp, 2,227 cubic inch supercharged Rolls Royce V12 aircraft engine. 
Built and maintained by a crew of aeronautical engineers rather than automobile
mechanics, Bluebird V represented the state of the art in automotive technology
of it's day.

To claim an official record, an average of two timed runs in opposite directions
is taken in order to compensate for the effects of wind and slope.  Campbell's
course started just south of the Main Street Pier in Daytona, driving under the
pier (some supporting pylons were removed to make room, and this gap remains
today), and ended in Ormond Beach to the north.  In this image, Campbell has
just started a run in the northerly direction, and is only about a quarter-mile
past the pier.

Today the current record now stands at 763 mph, faster than the speed of sound. 
Bluebird V's record was the last set in Daytona, before such attempts were
moved west to the deserts of Bonneville.  There, Campbell was able to coax
Bluebird to over 300 mph.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Good source material was the key to this picture.  I've lived in Daytona Beach
and the central Florida area for about 12 years and I think local knowledge
really helped with this image.  I've been to this very spot many times.  I've
also seen Bluebird V in the museum at the Daytona International Speedway, where
it is currently on display.  I was also able to find some good reference photos
of the car on the beach.  With these photos I was able to identify two
distinctly different configurations for the car, the 1935 Daytona setup (which
I modeled), and the 1936 Bonneville configuration.

I wanted this image to have an antique sepia tone look.  However, since tinting
the image in post-processing is out, I had to find a way to do it in the
renderer.  Instead, everything in the scene itself is modeled in
carefully-selected sepia tone colors.  I accomplished this by first building
the entire scene in full color, then pasting each color from every material
into PSP and converting them to their sepia tone equivalent, and finally
replacing the original colors in every material with these.  A bit tedious, but
I found this was the only way to get accurate sepia tints.  The .zip file
includes three small test renders illustrating this process.  One image shows
the scene in full color, the others show the scene at different stages in the
color conversion process.  I then placed a plane in front of the camera with a
fine, nearly transparent bozo colormap with a uniform brown color that varied
in filtering on one layer and black transparent streaks on another.  This gave
an overall yellow-brown tint and left specks and stains that give the image an
old, dirty, grainy look.

Bluebird's bodywork was built in Hamapatch.  I loaded a photo in the background
of the tool to help shape the body exactly.  The car is covered with seams and
rivets (typical 1930's aircraft construction) and while I modeled the seams, I
left off the rivets because I found that they are too small to see in the
image.  Campbell was also done in Hamapatch.  I recycled the head and body from
the patch skier in my "Winter" round entry but made a new helmet and goggles. 
The car's accessories (wheels, exhaust pipes, windscreen glass, etc...) were
made with CSG in Moray.

The trail of dust behind the car is made up of spheres filled with a combination
emission/absorption media, which I felt looked more like a light sand cloud
than scattering media.  I used a little artistic license in exaggerating the
level of dust a bit.  The actual runs were done on slightly damp and very hard
sand, and in reality very little sand was kicked up.  However, this left the
image looking very static and I felt a bigger cloud gives the picture a greater
sense of motion.

The water is a plane with a crackle surface normal.  I had some trouble modeling
the breaking surf.  I ended up using a heightfield made from 1m space imagery
of waves near the Main Street Pier, which I downloaded from Microsoft
Terraserver (http://terraserver.microsoft.com).  The heightfield is partially
sunk below the surface of the water plane, leaving the white surf poking up
through it.  This level of surf is consistent with the sea state visible in my
reference photos, and is positioned and scaled correctly based on the areal
photo.

The beach is a heightfield I made with the airbrush tool in PSP.  This is
probably a bit of overkill since the beach is flat and could have been
represented by a simple plane, but originally I had the camera positioned on
the top of some dunes present a little bit farther away from the water.  I
moved the camera but didn't want to redo the beach because the dunes are
(barely) visible in the reflections on the front wheel and bodywork.

The pier is standard CSG.  Since it's about a quarter mile away, it didn't have
to be very detailed.  The pier I modeled is based on a photo dated 1920.  The
only major visible change to the pier today is the installation of a cablecar
ride running it's length.  I'm guessing it was installed after 1935 and
therefore didn't include it.  The miscellaneous objects on the beach are also
almost all basic CSG, modelled from originals seen in several source photos.  I
had to guess on their colors, however.  I don't know what the sign said, it was
only visible from the back. :-)  The two seagulls and the sock part of the
windsock are patches made in Hamapatch.

The sky sphere is a simple gradient texture.  The clouds in the sky are a series
of transparent planes.  A little bit of ground fog far in the distance helps
blend the clouds into the horizon.

The image was rendered in a wide aspect ratio to accentuate the horizontal
movement of the car.  The final render was converted to .jpg in PSP, and I
tweaked the compression with JPEG Optimizer.

In addition to the aforementioned color test renders, I've also put a pair of
photos of the real Bluebird V in the .zip for reference.  Note that in the
rollout photo there are a pair of rodlike objects coming out of the radiator
exhaust duct that I did not model.  I don't know what purpose these rods serve
(any ideas?), they are almost always visible when the car is stopped but are
never present when the car is running and therefore are not on my car.

P.S.  Sorry for the long-winded text file.

