TITLE: Faster Than Light
NAME: Travis Schau
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: tschau@umich.edu
WEBPAGE: http://www.umich.edu/~tschau/
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: faster_t.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    maya 6

TOOLS USED: 
    maya 6, photoshop (ship decals)

RENDER TIME: 
    5 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    mac powerbook, OS X

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This image is an illustration of a physics hypothesis I came up with thinking
about "speed" for this round: 

If an object is moving away from a light source faster than the speed of light,
then the light no longer can catch up to the object and illuminate the back of
it.

Rather, the front of the faster-than-light object is now running head-on INTO
the light rays from the light source behind it.

So, in this image, the space ship is illuminated by the star, but because of the
ship's speed, the illumination is on the side facing AWAY from the star, while
the side facing the star is in a dark shadow.


note: The (im)possibility of faster-than-light travel is irrelevant to this
image. It is an isolated look at one specific aspect of faster-than-light
travel, and admittedly ignores much of the theoretical physics that would come
into play.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my first entry to the competition since 1997, so first off, I'm so happy
to have an image in the IRTC again. Not created in POV this time around, but a
wonderful student discount made Maya very affordable.

Everything in the image is fairly simple. I enjoy creating much more elaborately
modelled spaceships, but I really didn't want to distract from the concept
here.

The sun is a simple sphere with some minorly fancy texturing. The stars are an
imagemap background.

The entire ship, glass and interior included, is created out of simple polygons.
I was sad to see some of my nice modelling on the back of the ship and in its
interior get lost to shadow, but thus is the price of faster-than-light
travel.

The small decals on the ship (mostly lost to shadow) were created in photoshop.

That's about it. Next round I'll go full-out modelling crazy. For now, just a
physics idea I came up with and thought was interesting, and it's good to be
back.

