EMAIL: hartleym@sit.edu.my
NAME: Michael Hartley
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Last City
COUNTRY: Australia (but working in Malaysia)
WEBPAGE: http://www.angelfire.com/mt/ofolives
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.02
TOOLS USED: none
RENDER TIME: forgot to check. Only a few hours I think.
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 166MMX
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  
Last City, population 32 million, Area over 1,000,000 square miles.

Bathed in the reddish glow of the dying sun, inhabitants of the Last
City go about their daily business.

In the distant forgotten past the people had escaped their sapphire
home before it was engulfed by the growing sun. In the far far future,
they will have to flee again as its warmth grows colder, colder...

But for now? Life goes on. Today, as yesterday, as always...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The asteroids are blobs, generated randomly using an #included file.
Having made the asteroids, I selected some suitable points on their
surface to build the towers and domes.

Most other shapes are made using csg. The most chalenging (besides
perhaps the asteroids) was the communications bulb. I wanted 20
individually rotatable dishes, but done in such a way that I could
have a set of, say, 5 or 6 dishes all pointing in the same direction.
As you can see, it worked. Not so easy, since the dishes are placed
in the same way that the faces of the icosahedron in shapes2.inc are
placed - via {shape translate T rotate R}

I got the dishes where I wanted them via:

{dish rotate Rwanted rotate R^(-1) translate T rotate R}

and it worked!

The starry sky is a sky_sphere with a bozo texture, scaled small, and
with a color map which is black from 0 to 0.99, then fades to white.
It works ok here, but fails badly when animated.

The spaceships disappearing into the distance are placed randomly
along a line, using a #while loop. 

Yours, Mike H
28th April 2000