NAME: Martin Magnusson EMAIL: Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se COUNTRY: Sweden WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9946/ TITLE: Uppsala by Night TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT RENDERER USED: POVray 3.01 TOOLS USED: Moray 2.5, Corel Photo-Paint 5.0 and Corel Draw 5.0 RENDER TIME: 6 hours? HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In August I moved away from my old home town to a city called Uppsala, and I was really eager to trace a scene with a local motif. There are so many beatiful houses and bridges around here. This may not be the most beautiful scenery, but I guess it's one that fits the topic. This is a view from the roof of my house, and I tried to make it as 'correct' as possible. I did allow for one 'artistic liberty' however - I moved News Cafe (where the black awnings are), which actually is a few blocks away, to make the connection to nightlife and entertainment clearer (they have stand-up comedy every now and then, but unfortunately you can't see any of that in this image...). Included in the zip-file is also a real photo of the scene. (By the way, something really weird happened to me while making this image. During the last two months I've been running up and down to the terrass on the top of the house I live in to see what the houses on the other side of the street look like. One day, when I was just about to go down after standing on the terrass for a few minutes trying to memorize the scene, I saw a police car driving down the street with the sirens on. When I walked down the stairs I saw the elevator going up with two policemen in it. Of course I wondered what might have happened, but I went inside my apartment. After a while I heard the police- men talking on the stairs. Naturally I was curious and sneaked up behind the door and tried to hear what they said. Much to my surprise I heard them say in the radio "The guy has gone down from the roof now, and we're trying to identify which apartment he lives in"! That made me pretty nervous... Shortly thereafter the doorbell rang, and I opened the door while my heart beat at some 250 bpm. The policeman outside said to me: "Are you the one who was up on the roof just now?" I managed to squeek a weak "Yes...". Then he said "Is every- thing allright? Do you have any problems?" Someone on the street had seen me and thought that I was about to kill myself!) Anyway, let's go on to the DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Most of the code is 'hand made', but some objects are modelled with Moray (e g some of the curtains and the banner that says Svava). The walls, pavements and the cobble in the alley use lots of while-loops. To get the soft edges of the light from the spotlight on the left wall and the lightpost I used semitransparent spheres with gradient pigments around the light sources in stead of using area lights, which would have taken much more time to render, and probably wouldn't have looked the way I wanted anyway. I also found out that POV-Ray's quilt pattern can be used for all sorts of different things. I used it with texture maps for some of the signs to make them look as if there were fluorescent tubes in them, and in a normal statement with Restaurant China River's awnings.