TITLE: Bogeys
NAME: Dave Merchant
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kosh@nesys.com
WEBPAGE: www.nesys.com
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bogeys.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for JPEG conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    0 hour 56 min 44 secs on P400 128 NT 4.0
...........: 2 hour 37 min 54 secs on P200  64 W98

HARDWARE USED: 
    P400, 128 mb RAM, NT4.0

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In the spring of 1945, at 0300, 29,000 feet above the Pacific, the crew of
Dinah Might, a Guam-based B-29, has visitors.

The airplane had become separated from the formation by a storm, and was
alone in the sky. "Bogeys! 12 O'clock high! Closing!" shouted the bombardier.
The pilot, with the copilot helping, threw the heavily loaded aircraft into
a sharp evasive turn, as the bombardier moved back from the nose into the
cockpit, in case of collision. Despite the sharp turn, the unidentified
ships easily stayed in front of the B-29. The bombardier braced his strike
camera against the pilots' seatbacks and snapped this one photo.
Before he could wind the film for another shot, the ships departed,
straight up at a high rate of speed.

Unfortunately, on returning to base, the undeveloped film was confiscated
by men in black suits.

Dinah Might never flew again. The sharp turn with a full bomb load bent her
main wing spar, and she became a ramp tramp, supplying parts for other planes.

Lacking photographic evidence of their encounter, the flight crew was docked
a month's flight pay for unauthorized aerobatics.

In later years, several of the crew members experienced nightmares of
unexplained medical experiments.


FIRST ENCOUNTER

Although there were earlier sketchy stories, the first detailed UFO sighting
reports came from WW-II air crews, flying at high altitudes.

The craft were generally described as saucer or cigar shaped, with rotating
glowing lights. They would fly alongside for a while, then suddenly dart
away at extremely high speed. The most common term for them at the time was
"foo fighters".

We now know that the ships seen here are Vree light cruisers, about 200 feet
in diameter, apparently attached to a larger fleet stationed further out from
the planet. The unstable blue plasma visible in the drive conduits shows that
these are later versions of these ships, fully interstellar, although somewhat
uncomfortable on galactic passages.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Two entries? They are a pair, since there are at least 2 sides to every
story. I considered a split screen, but at only 800x600, too much detail
would be lost. As the Vorlons say, "Truth is a three edged sword."

Object commonality between the 2 scenes is only the UFO exterior and the
cockpit window section of the B-29.

This scene started out to be a Winseat, based on the great X-Files
multi-parter in which the nerdy victim gets levitated out the side of an
airliner, and on return, his watch has lost 18 minutes of time.
The saucer would be seen through the window, with a glow surrounding it as
the side of the plane was being ripped off to carry away the nerd.

My daughter Linda and I made the saucer one evening, and it seemed a shame
not to give a nice clear view of it. Then I thought of the historical
comments about B-29's (and HE-111's), that the huge expanse of windows made
crews feel very exposed when the shooting started, as compared to the secure
feeling when "protected" by a thin sheet of aluminum. At night, high above
the Pacific, 1000 miles from base, you might start feeling quite exposed
when these folks showed up.

The UFO's are similar to the friendly Vree ships seen on Babylon-5, and to
those on the Art Bell web site. The B5 versions represent one of several
subtle Roswell/UFO/Alien Abduction references which JMS has cleverly thrown
into the story, with no explanation, part of the reason the show has such a
following.

The UFO's are CSG, finished in dark chrome. The ripple of the plasma is
just a bumps texture. Note that the rim of the saucer is slightly rounded,
rather than being a sharp edge. There is no light source on the UFO's.
Ambient is used instead, to get a diffuse plasma effect.

The outer part of the ships, including the drive conduits, rotates at about
10 RPM, while the center cockpit area remains stationary.

Although the real subject of the image was the UFO's, most of the work went
into making the interior of the B-29 correct.

Reference material turned out to be a problem, as there are thousands of
exterior pictures of B-29's, but very few interiors. This may well have been
due to tight security restrictions on photography. As an example, the
top-secret Norden bombsight is visible in the nose in this scene.

One useful, but undated, black and white panoramic view, taken from almost
the same position as this scene, was found on the US Air Force Museum site,
at:
        http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/bombers/b29-1.jpg
        http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/bombers/b3-30.htm
        http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/research/bombers/b29-2.jpg

A couple of other views were found in books. However, these pictures appear
to differ on placement of instruments, so I had to guess in some cases,
while in other cases, the individual instruments are completely identified.

Only the nose of the B-29 was modeled, and is reasonably OK from the outside,
but is really only intended as an interior model. The control panels are
modeled straight from the prototype photos.

The interior color is a very flat olive drab, which was very commonly used
inside bombers, not for camoflage, but as anti-glare and anti-corrosion
coating. I have several WW-II aircraft surplus turret drive gearboxes that
were used for color reference. However, this is not necessarily the correct
color, as several different shades of green were used by various builders,
some of which were quite bright, with a yellow aspect.

The pilot's and copilot's panels are very sparse for such a complex aircraft,
because B-29s carried a flight engineer, riding backward behind the copilot's
seat, monitoring a huge engine control panel. For ease of maintenance, the
panels were open backed, giving the interior an unfinished look. Standard
practice of the time was to leave the wiring bundles exposed for easy tracing
and repair. The aircraft grade wire used had bright white insulation, but I
suspect that the crews may have covered it or painted it to reduce the glare.

The panels are simple open-backed boxes, sitting on little 4 legged tables.
This seems primitive, but contributed to weight saving and maintainability.
As a result, you can see daylight below the panels.

The fact that most of the instrument needles are pointing straight up is
correct. The scales of the various instruments were rotated by varying amounts
to ensure that when everything was OK, the needles pointed straight up.
Thus a pilot could scan the panel quickly for problems.

Additionally, many of the gauges had 2 needles, to reduce the number of
dials on the panel. Thus there are 2 tachometers and 2 manifold pressure
gage dials to handle all 4 engines.

Note that most published photos show the pilots' side windows open, as they
normally were on the ground, but they were closed in flight, since this was
a pressurized aircraft. The cockpit of a B29 was normally called
"the greenhouse", since the sun made it so hot.

The pilot and copilot are constructed of blobs, articulated so that they
can be animated. The hands are also blobs, with individual articulated
fingers, able to be animated. They are built with several macros.
An important aspect of hand modeling is to note that the finger bones
and tendons extend all the way to the wrist, and are perceptible on the
surface of the back of the hand. Pilots tend to be very sun-baked and
leathery, but the white knuckles still appear on some occasions.
The ability of blobs to mix colors was used to represent this.

I made up a macro to string toroidal segments together to make the wiring
harnesses, complete with tie wraps. 

Note that the cockpit window frames are constructed from aluminum stampings,
with a curved cross section like a car interior, while the frame of the
nose section is a large single piece aluminum or magnesium casting, with
a sharp edged 'T' cross section.

There are several types of fasteners in the cockpit frame, which were all
done with the same imagemap GIF, scaled to different sizes. The smallest
ones are rivets which tie the inner and outer frames together to make
a structural unit. The large "rivets" in the rounded part of the cockpit
sheet metal appear to be screws which hold the outer window frames,
which in turn retain the plexiglas (the trade name has only one "s").
In the cast bombardier's nose piece, there are smaller screws driven in
from the outside to hold the outer window frames.

A wide angle camera, 60 degrees, was used to get the desired expansiveness
of the cockpit windows.

I made glass for the windows, but didn't use it, as it attenuates the
light from the UFO's, and doesn't produce the desired internal reflections.

Printed warnings on the panels were done as image map GIFs.
They are:

    310 M.P.H. MAX. IND. AIRSPEED

            FLAP WARNING
       FLAPS MUST BE EXTENDED
         25' BEFORE TAKEOFF

... and a grid of POWER CONDITIONS vs MANIFOLD PRESSURE at various RPMs.

Clouds are an adaptation from one of the standard POV sky-spheres.
These are kind of nice for this use, as they produce cloud decks at two
different altitudes, with the aircraft in the clear sky between them.
This nicely shows the angle of bank.


