Ah, great guesses everyone! (well played
@Jo Kariboo 😄) I'll get to the answer in a moment, but first...
Ted Chiang has two collections of short stories. The first I read is actually his second, and much more recent (2019), called "Exhalation: Stories". I quite enjoyed that one, so now I'm reading the earlier collection from 2002, "Stories of Your Life and Others", and already I can see that it is in keeping with what I liked about his other collection. In general I find him to have a tremendous and lively imagination, with a gift for evocative but simple story telling, and ideas that are at times somewhat mind-bending, and often seem to lend themselves to potentially unique visualizations. This is not the first time Terragen came to mind when reading one of his stories, it's just the first time I acted on it.
So if you like good short-form science fiction with explorations of challenging ideas, I highly recommend his work! (that's for you
@DocCharly65 )
This particular story is called "The Tower of Babylon", and I am both pleased and perhaps just slightly disappointed that no one quite guessed it. Pleased because it means the result is sufficiently abstract to be something you can map your own ideas and expectations to, which I sometimes enjoy in art. But disappointed because it means perhaps that my depiction is not as accurate or evocative of the idea as I hoped. Then again it's not something anyone would
ever expect to see, so it's reasonable not to guess it...
What you're seeing is essentially a 100km tall "tower" (in this case just a simple, elongated cube). In the book its construction is described in surprising detail, and I may try to replicate some more detail in it (it's all made out of bricks, laid individually, for centuries). But from this distance it was clear the specifics would not really matter. In any case they are building a tower literally up to the "vault of heaven", with the intent to try to enter into it through sheer manpower and effort! The tower is a mere ~30 meters square, but rises up above the mountains and clouds to 100km in height! (my estimate of how far one could walk in 2 days, as the book estimates its height)
The book doesn't make clear exactly how tall it is, so this is just a quick visualization. But the key scene that made me want to try rendering it was a description of the view from the tower itself, looking down as you watch the sunset rushing up the sides of it - literally watching the shadow of the Earth move up it! This would of course happen surprisingly quickly at this altitude due to the distance between the source of the shadow and where it is cast (on the tower). The view I got from the tower itself wasn't as interesting as I hoped (see below), so I tried the distant shot and liked what I saw.
@WAS, I did consider animating it, and may still do so, but it may go quite quickly in real-time! That itself might be interesting to see...
A space elevator would indeed be cool to make one day. Also just a "very thin line", but at least with something traveling up/down it.
Happy New Year to you all!
P.S. There was a part of me that wanted my return here to be some hyper-realistic, detailed real-world scene. But if I'd kept that goal for myself I might never have posted. So I'm glad I did, and I hope you enjoyed the little guessing game as well. Perhaps I'll be back again some time. For now, back into rendering obscurity!