Lon Bliss wrote:
> 
> Here is the close up of Ringworld.  I used a 'peel' texture so you can
> see the contour of the ring.  I am relitivly new at this, so any
> suggestions on applying terrain?.
> 
> Tanks Lon
> 
>     ---------------------------------------------------------------
>  [Image]


You might be interested in this guy's (James W. Williams') site:
http://www.rahul.net/rootbear/graphics/ringworld/
   "Rendering Larry Niven's Ringworld"
He used Renderman.
If you follow his tour, you end up at
http://www.rahul.net/rootbear/graphics/ringworld/rw5.html "The Ringworld
Surface"

Depending on your ultimate goal, you may have to fudge the scale of some
of the features.
As Jim sez:
"I used this and similar views to try getting a picture of the rim wall.
Unfortunately, the rim wall is so small compared to the width
of the ring that unless I shaded it in some garish manner, such as
making it hot pink, it simply didn't show up at all."

It sounds like he used dimensions that were given in the book, but you
could always apply a bit of artistic license and exaggerate things like
the height of the walls and the Spill Mountains beside them, or
"Fist-of-God Mountain" and its nearby "Eye Storm".

One problem that you might come up against is that fans of Larry Niven
might object to this sort of messing around with the technical details.
In that case, just whip out your artistic license. After all, it's
obvious that the book cover illustrations were not 100% correct.

Whatever you use for terrain, it would be nice if it was some effect
that worked no matter where the camera was. If you used an image map for
a view from space, for example, it would break down into a huge pattern
of squares as you swooped in for a landing, I guess, so maybe a
procedural texture would be better. I dunno - the scale of the Ringworld
makes it a real challenge. It depends on how ambitious you want to be.

-jr- 
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