EMAIL: hildurka@simnet.is
NAME: Hildur Kolbrun Andresdottir
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Old Meets New
COUNTRY: Iceland
WEBPAGE: n/a
RENDERER USED: Povray
TOOLS USED: Moray, Photoshop, Corel Draw
RENDER TIME: 08h43m52s
HARDWARE USED: Amd Athlon 1200 mHz, 512 mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Old meets new. We see it everywhere, all the time. In our towns and cities, old buildings and new buildings side by side. Sometimes these buildings live in harmony, sometimes it is almost like they scream at each other. There are millions of examples to be found throughout the world, but I chose this one simply because this particular mosque was seen frequently on my T.V. screen during the "shoch and awe" operation.

This is the Al Wya Mosque in the center of Baghdad and next to it is The Arch of the Unknown Soldier. The people of Baghdad now face a historical point in time, the old is meeting the new. Letīs just hope that the new brings security, happiness and prosperity to them.

The mosque stands firmly on the ground, deeply anchored in the tradition and the old. At the same time this more modern monument seemes almost about to levitate, giving new breeze and hope of the future. The earth meets the sky.

I donīt know when either was built, it is difficult to find any useful information about anything cultural in Iraq. My reference photo was taken in 1968, some 35 years ago. Only a couple of days ago I found out that they later repainted the mosque and the vault now has a different pattern on it, in turquoise and gold.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I only started this scene some 2 weeks ago and I honestly wasnīt sure I was going to finish on time.
I wanted to include more buildings in the background but had to do with more trees instead.

The modelling part is mostly CGFs. The mosque is not very detailed and it does not look good up close. The vault is a rot sweep with "shadow off" to avoid the self shadow artifact.

I spent a lot of time on the textures, trying to make them more "dirty" but somehow radiosity always seems to wash away my dirt. I used bitmaps for the patterns on the mosque and the tower. I made the patterns in Corel Draw as an estimate to what I could make out from the reference photo. I made one strip up of the pattern, and duplicated side by side up to the right amount to encircle the form. That way I didnīt need to make any major adjustments to the textures in Moray. 
The holes in the green grid on the tower wall were made  by using a simple hexagon texture pattern. The texture on the arch is a birck bitmap with several layers of dirt on top.

In the distance I put some ground fog to simulate sand storm. The trees come from the MakeTree macro. It wasnīt designed for palm trees but I couldnīt find any decent palm tree macro so these have to do.

Enjoy!