HUD by Bill Marrs, October 1995
===============================

Comments:
========

This image was inspired by the film Koyaanisquatsi.  One segment of the
film showed rows and rows of apartment buildings on the outskirts of a
city (Chicago, I believe).  They were all abandoned.  It made me think
of the many failed HUD (US Dept of Housing and Urban Development) city
projects.

I am very pleased with this image.  I think it is my best ray-traced
image to date.  I was stunned when I first rendered the full scene, it
was exactly what I had envisioned in my mind.  The colors and lighting
exceeded my hopes. 

Technical Notes:
===============
Duplicating that many complex objects (buildings) turns out to require
excessive amounts of memory for povray to load the file.  I was lucky to
have weekend access to my company's most powerful server to render this
scene.

Tools:
=====
    POVsb         A windows scene builder.  I used this to create the building
                  object.
    Winpov08      An unofficial Windows compile of Povray.  I used this to
                  test various early versions of the scene
    notgnu        An emacs editor for Windows used to hand edit the .pov file

    (all of the above programs are available on the Net 
            - ask if you need to know where)

Image:
=====
    The image you see was rendered on a Sun Sparc 20 with 256 megabytes of
    main memeory.  Memory was a major issue - I couldn't even load the
    file on a machine with (only!) 128 megabytes.

    POV-Ray Options in effect: +fd +mb25 +a0.300 +j1.000 +r3 -q9 -w800 -h600
    -s1 -e600 -k0.000 -mv2.0 -ihud.pov

    hud.pov statistics
    --------------------------------------
    Resolution 800 x 600
    # Rays:     7067263    # Pixels:      480800  # Pixels supersampled:     104840
      Ray->Shape Intersection Tests:
      Type             Tests    Succeeded   Percentage
      -----------------------------------------------------------
      Plane          10295949     5505142       53.47
      Box          1666692725    32983547        1.98
      Calls to Noise:      3974082
      Calls to DNoise:     3612823
      Shadow Ray Tests:    9026079     Blocking Objects Found:     3460018
      Reflected Rays:      3217673
      Refracted Rays:      2511929
      Time For Trace:    6 hours 21 minutes 11.00 seconds

Files:
=====
    hud.psb      - The POVsb file of the bulding only.
    hud.pov      - Most of this file contains the output of POVsb, I
                   added the fog, city-skyline, walkways, and
                   duplicated the buidling by hand (at the bottom).
    
Comments?
=========
    Please email any comments or criticisms to bill@atria.com.
    See http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/bill for more info about me.