Worlds do not always have to be plain old balls of dirt speeding through space, it’s also possible to have artificial constructs as your worlds. One such design was created by Arthur C. Clarke for his book Rendezvous with Rama. Rama is a space ship in the shape of a hollow cylinder; such designs have been created by NASA as hypothetical future space stations.

Anyway, the Rama spaceship is quite large, and a Frenchman, Eric Bruneton, sought a way to render this huge scenery. He developed methods for this that are quite interesting, and you can visit his website about Rendering Rama to see the resulting art and read a very interesting article on how he accomplished the feat.

As you can see, he succeeded beautifully.

I must say that I always pictured Rama’s interior as more artificial-looking, but that could have been my misreading of the story. Of course Eric’s rendering is more a demonstration of technology rather than a faithful rendering. Either way, I thought that this was a great little gem that people interested in world building or constructed worlds might be interested in.