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 )

