From Coast to Coast

LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN FRANCISCO

This picture is inspired entirely by the Stevenson's book. I didn't read it, but I browsed it enough to figure a concept out of it. I found a lot of French in the text (see chapter IV: Epilogue to "An Inland Voyage"), and it gave me this idea: an interesting coincidence.

The voyage starts with the Statue of Liberty representing both NY and the Atiantic ocean. It has been given to the United States by the people of France. San Francisco is the destination where the Golden Gate represents the Pacific ocean. The city has been named after Francis of Assisi. His French name being "François d'Assise", and "François" meaning exactly "Français" (in old French), "San Francisco" actually stands for "Saint Français".

From the Wiki: "Francis was one of seven children born to Pietro di Bernardone, a rich cloth merchant, and his wife Pica, about whom little is known except that she was originally from France. Pietro was in France on business when Francis was born, and he took to calling him Francesco, in honor of his commercial success and enthusiasm for all things French."

So the journey is French all the way through. It starts with a French gift (Statue of Liberty), then there are many references to French (Fontainebleau, etc.) throughout the book, and it leads to San Francisco meaning "Saint French".

With the locomotive-smoke-like real cloud, the picture refers to a few subtitles of the book, namely:

1 - THE EMIGRANT TRAIN
2 - TO THE GOLDEN GATES
3 - THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC

Interestingly enough "pacifique" in French means "peaceful".

I am not absolutely sure that it is readable, but don't miss the book!

(this is a pun!)

Very interesting round indeed. We'll see, but I think it can beat "Evidence..." as the best round ever.

For this entry, I went into the most fundamental problem of my system: speed. Of course, rasterization is much faster than ray tracing for small scenes, but you ray-tracing guys don't have to edit your scenes using ray tracing. You actually use rasterization (wireframe, etc). The only difference is that I also use rasterization for the final renderings which are very fast compared to ray tracing. The capabilities are limited, but enough to be competitive for a challenge such as the TC-RTC. The problem with my system is that it can not be faster than the full-featured final rendering! So it is pretty darn slow for big scenes! This one took 5 minutes for 4x4 subsampling, so one frame needs about 20 seconds. Unless I hide some stuff, it takes at least 20 seconds to do whatever I want to, move an object, change a color, anything.

People may wonder "how could you do such big scenes in the first place? When I try doing the same, I always run out of memory!". The answer is simple: firstly, the geometry meshes are stripified. It means that instead of keeping lists of triangles, the geometries use triangle strips. Such a structure use much less memory by connecting the triangles to greatly reduce the number of common vertices. Secondly, the most important reason is that most geometries are simply reused without being duplicated in memory. There are many identical buildings, but it is not really noticeable or annoying. New York and San Francisco actually share the same city in the picture, but since it is seen from different angles, we just can't notice it. As a result, the entire scene takes only 90 MB in memory.

Instead of texturing all individual buildings, I used an overlay noise layer. It is not post-processed as it is part of the scene: a transparent billboard just in front of the camera. I was able to tune the noise amplitude and frequency without having to edit the buildings one by one. The Empire State Building texturing is rather wrong as the windows have different scales. But once again, I don't think it is annoying or even noticeable unless one takes a closer look.

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One last point is related to the concept itself. I must confess I didn't expect such an interesting twist. As a French-speaking person, it just blown me away. So the composition may have a strange angle (seen from North in a distorted way), but this angle is the one I would personally see from home (Québec).We are 5 millions French-native people in an ocean of hundreds of millions of English-native people. And this picture is a way for me to say "We exist" to the world, or at least to America.

"From coast to coast" is the dictum of Canada, but in Québec, we say "D'un océan à l'autre", one ocean to the other.