Panama Rican

Sometimes a bridge needs another one...

The Panama Canal allows for bridging the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, thus avoiding the long southernmost shipping route. But at some point, one needed to reconnect the supercontinent.

The Centennial Bridge was built to supplement the overcrowded Bridge of the Americas, and to replace it as the carrier of the Pan-American Highway. The entire landmass reachable through such a tiny funnel covers almost exactly the surface of the moon. This scene is merely a pinhole compared to Earth's size, but together, it lies at the center of a cross as large as the planet...

As above, so below.

A rainbow looks like a bridge from nowhere to nowhere since its endpoints move as we move. The American eagle uses the atmosphere as a bridge made of air, ships use the canal as a bridge made of water whose reflection suggests again a bridge between real and virtual worlds...

And an image stands as what it stands for: a bridge that joins a concept and thousands of words.

The software used is entirely homemade both for scene-graph modeling and rendering. In fact, it is a so early-stage prototype that I spent more time fixing the emerging problems rather than actually working on the scene itself (that was my biggest test so far for sure)...

The scaling of the setup is pretty realistic as I captured a low-resolution satellite image (Google) for getting the actual location and environment of the Centennial Bridge. Using a painter (gimp), I erased the bridge itself from the imaging and mapped the resulting reference image onto 3D objects (B-splines for terrain, etc) with various texture coordinate transformations.

I made the bridge myself (starting from a photograph of the original), but all other 3D models (cranes, vehicles, buildings, ships, people, etc) come from public domain (thanks to archive3d.net). The sky, moon, Earth and rainbow are mapped photographs.

No ray tracing was necessary for the rendering as my program uses (faster) OpenGL instead. Every step of fine tuning is done in seconds and always corresponds to the final result, without anti-aliasing which takes all the rendering time (256 per-pixel samples / accumulation buffer passes).