July 2010 Entry : The Solur Nexedifice of Kharaghan

[Sapiento]

Awesome! Looks great.

[Gidde]

This looks really cool!

[Crayons]

I was continuing along the "shelf" and got to the "Temple" area - which lead me to certain decisions I had been forestalling. At the moment the scheme of the place is rather mud-hutty but the temple, whilst following this form, is more lavish. So in a traditional vein I went for Gold, literally - this being common with Sun worshipping cultures.
This then gave me the final "look and feel" for the edifice itself , which, you may note, I have been studiously avoiding.
Thinking it all through I've tied together the basis of this world's Technomancy with the architecture and the theme of this challenge, ultimately.
The Technomancy revolves around the alternate "elemental forces" of Light, Gravity, Lightning and Entropy - as opposed to the old heretical "pantheon" of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. The unification of these new alternate energies is now approximately understood and relates to their interaction with Matter and in it's purest form, Minerals and Metals. Some materials attract or repel these forces and allow the Technosorcerors to, in part, manipulate them.
More of this later perhaps.
In terms of this as a project, the finished product is likely to be a stolen page from some Technomicon or other detailing the site. Being Technomagical in nature the depictions on the page will be Technological themselves - which is a cheaty way for me to present 3D "stuff" on it !!! Phew!
Anyway - as you may have guessed, the Edifce itself is a Solur energy array not dissimilar to a real world Solar Furnace thingy. The problem I have there is that the real things are huge and - well, not to put too fine a point on it, rather underwhelming. There are no blisteringly visible "light saber"-like beams of solid light energy, nothin'. Just a lot of mirrors somewhere hot, and a tower with a small window and... well, sadly, light itself isn't visible - only the things it hits... well you know what I mean!
Whilst I'm not here to belittle the hugely important achievements of the engineers and scientists involved in such things, the results of their endeavours are not spectacular in the way I need. I speak from experience, I once spent a year and a half designing some intensely rugged communications technology the only significant result of which was... well, the ability for people to talk to each other - just like on your landline. Wow. Underwhelming or what?
I'm rambling.
I need a reflector element for my collector. It uses a lot of thick gold enamelling. Not just for the lavishness thing, it's also practical (sort of). The gold reflects (mostly), it doesn't tarnish, so the mirrors stay good longer, and being malleable, scratches can be polished out. OK, yes, there are lots of baaaaad reasons to use gold I imagine, but it's my universe!
So here's a reflector in my POVRay "workshop" (the version I use for building "things" before including them)
(I've not put a latest WIP marker on this since it's only a subassambly)
I'm afraid I got a tad involved putting teeth on cogs and things, POVRay does that to you. Anyway, yes, the mirror is all blue as its reflecting the infinite blue of my workshop, but you can see its affect in the reflection of the x-y-z axes that are rendered there for my visiualisation.
I'm looking at the render of the array of these currently running on my laptop here. With all the light saberish "stuff" going on it has taken 16 hours to render at 1024x768 and it's only 75% done. Oh well. The image will work as an insert, I think (cropped, edited and much reduced!).

[Crayons]

Huh!
That all said (in the above), the render suddenly perked up at the end! Finishing in 16 hours and 46 minutes.
I'm posting the unabridged version of the render (just cropped a bit) to show up the strange black artefact that seems to have occurred. I think this is a result of so many light cylinders overlapping at the "focus" - I'll have to tidy that up in PSP I guess.
I'll probably try and fix it properly though - this was supposed to be just a first "stab" at seeing what the thing would look like. In this version the reflectors are actually pointing in a rather arbitrary angle in relation to the "sun" and I really ought to do all the maths to get it "right" - even if the actual beams of light will always focus properly! There are some other bits that aren't quite right or are too "simple" for me.
For those of you who haven't used 3D tools like this it's all a huge "cheat" - artistically speaking. I say "artistically" inadvisably here. Most of the time one just bangs out objects and chucks them together, then with a few extra lines of code you can let loose the "serendipity monkeys" and hope something interesting happens. Someone mentioned the old infinite number of monkeys writing shakespeare adage elsewhere here recently. In some ways, running POVray is like all those simians!
### LATEST WIP ###

Technomancy Notes: The Solur Collectors focus the Energy onto the central tower which directs the beam into the Inner Sanctorum where the Light is Blessed and routed on to the Entromantic Temple for transmission down their Air Pipe (or something!)

[Jaxilon]

ahhh, I'm blind!! I looked into the Sun :O

Very cool man, this is coming along nicely.

[tilt]

@GP *spaghetti western style music playing* .... *close up to eyes of man with black hat.* .... so ... I hear you're a fast mapper... *hand poised above pen*... *lol*

Back to business: Looking really good Crayons - very nice work indeed and a very cool idea too

[Aval Penworth]

I must be having a dumb momment, because I can't understand what is going on in this project. I suppose when it is finished it will all make sense.

[Crayons]

I must be having a dumb momment, because I can't understand what is going on in this project. I suppose when it is finished it will all make sense.

What seems to be the problem? You can always ask !

[Jaxilon]

I think I know what he means - The first post is a distance shot of community living in the side of a cliff. The next few show a side shot of buildings in the cliff and a top-down view of same. Then you show a single Solar Collector followed by an array of Solar collectors (so far they don't look to be located withing the community but I'm guessing that's what comes next).

Possibly some confusion due to never having used POV (I think that's what you said you were using). Perhaps it's the different views without much reference point due to everything not being in a comprehensive piece yet. Personally, I think I follow what you are doing and look forward to seeing how it all turns out.

[Crayons]

Ah! Right. Well, the two tie together much as one would expect. I've just worked out the cutting in the side of the cliff for the stairs up to the actual Nexus link itself.
Light is collected during the main daylight hours, deflected into a subterranian area for "processing" and then routed sideways out again for onward transmission towards the next Nexus node. In order to transmit such an amount of power through the air it requires a rarified atmospheric "pipe" created by mages of the Entropic Order whose temple sits higher up in the excavated recess in the cliff at the exit point (the rather dull looking tube at the moment).
This is a view closer to sunset.
### LATEST WIP ###

I still have the main buildings to complete.