Stories of Your Life - a sketch

[sboerner]

Late to the party, as usual!  Sorry I missed participating in your visual game, Oshyan. I have read Stories of Your Life and mind-bending is certainly a good word to describe many of Ted Chiang's ideas. Highly recommended.

Anyway, lovely render and great to hear from you. Please don't fade back into obscurity completely. And best wishes for 2021.

[zaxxon]

Nice to see you here at the TG Forum, and with a render and a challenge! You always have a knack for stimulating discussion!  Like some others my first thought was that it was what's commonly called a "Beanstalk", a familiar Science Fiction trope; the 'beanstalk' actually 'hangs' from a geo-synchronous station in low Earth orbit, and is 'tethered'  to a fixed point below. To build one up from the ground, block by block, seems only to invite the inevitable Biblical consequence...  My other thought was that it was similar to Niven's "Ringworld": an enormous ring section of a Dyson sphere seen edge-on from high orbit. Even with TG's planetary scale possibilities it's hard to portray scenes like this without the image becoming an abstraction. I tried something  similar a number of years ago:   

planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15507.msg150686.html#msg150686

I think a couple of folks have attempted such scenes here in the past, but the objects are so vast that it's hard to reference the scale in relation to normal human experience. As an image I do like the cleaness and simplicity of the composition and lighting. Overall a stunning image to return with! Hopefully this is a start for more to come! 

[RichTwo]

Ah ha. Well explained Oshyan. But unless constructed almost exactly on the equator of a planet which has a rotation as our own (or probably no Moon) and with materials such as nanotechnology that are at our grasp, mere bricks would never work. But you can always dream!

I forgot to say- Welcome back!

[Oshyan]

Well, Oshyan, this is probably something hard to guess I think, because it doesn't sound physically possible. I haven't read the books with the stories, but I watched Arrival, so I expected something ficticious but at the same time leaving the impression of something realistic.

Mmm, yes that's fair. I had read his other book and know that while he is generally a sci-fi author, he plays with themes of fantasy, even faith and religion, etc. as well.

planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,15507.msg150686.html#msg150686

I think a couple of folks have attempted such scenes here in the past, but the objects are so vast that it's hard to reference the scale in relation to normal human experience. As an image I do like the cleaness and simplicity of the composition and lighting. Overall a stunning image to return with! Hopefully this is a start for more to come! 

Thanks! Yeah, I originally intended to visualize it as if I were *on* the tower and thought it might be more interesting. But since it wasn't, I found this view and it was precisely because it was so abstract that I found it interesting (to my surprise).

Anyway, thanks for guessing and commenting everyone! Nice to dip my toe in a little. I don't know when I'll be back again, but I'll drop in to at least check-in on things from time to time...

Happy New Year to all!

- Oshyan

[pixelpusher636]

I know this one! 😁
It's from the book "The Tower of Babylon" (by Ted Chiang).
It's the tower the guy watches at sunrise that's 100s of kilometers tall and stretches up to "heaven". Terragen is the perfect tool for the job! Nice work.