TITLE: Uppsala by Night
NAME: Martin Magnusson
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9946/
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: ubn.jpg
ZIPFILE: ubn.zip
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.