TITLE: The City Imagined
NAME: Katherine Smith
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kathsth@pacbell.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.bigfoot.com/~kathsth/
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: imagined.jpg
ZIPFILE: imagined.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Povray, Brio track, ruler, calipers, graph paper and pencil, Law of
Cosines, and my Palm Pilot equipped with a GoType keyboard. :-)

RENDER TIME: 

        Time For Parse:    0 hours  1 minutes  33.0 seconds (93 seconds)
        Time For Trace:    6 hours 19 minutes  22.0 seconds (22762 seconds)
        Total Time:    6 hours 20 minutes  55.0 seconds (22855 seconds)
        Literally half of the render time was the Name and Title box cars in the
foreground.  Lesson learned: bolding a font by shifting it small amounts over a
3x3 xy grid and then differencing from a super ellipsoid is not a good
(efficient) idea.


HARDWARE USED: 
    350MHz Macintosh G4, 320Mb ram.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        I loved playing with Brio train sets and imagining immense cities when I
was little.  The reality of the toy train set fades into the imagined city.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        This is my first IRTC image and I had a rocking good time.  Quite
frankly I obsessed about this competition, I put in at least 20 hours a week. 
I was so obsessed that I had to buy a keyboard for my PalmV so I could edit
povray files while I was on the train to work!  I have to stay out of the next
round though, in order to put my life back together.  
        I discovered povray maybe 3 weeks before the start of this competition
and was instantly hooked.  Since this was my first major work with povray, I
decided that I didn't want to use any image maps or external modelers, to force
myself to learn and push povray as far as I could.  As a result I got pretty
creative with layered textures and texture maps, and ended up with more varied
scenery algorithmically than I think I could have using image maps for
buildings and houses.
        The train tracks and trains are modeled after Brio and Brio compatible
sets.  All track pieces actually exist in the real world and are faithfully
modeled at 1in. to 1povray unit.  The trains are approximations, since I
couldn't borrow any (I borrowed some track) but are based on real trains. 
        There is a track layout engine that takes a list of track pieces and
automatically lays them out, checks for loop closure and goes back to the first
unclosed branch point to continue.  So it's fairly simple to create different
tracks, the only weird point is dealing with branch points, and the order that
their returned to.
        There is also a train layout engine which you give a list of objects
with sizes, and a linear (non branching) track sequence.  Then all the objects
are laid out on a path above the specified track sequence.  This part was a lot
of fun and was what required the Law of Cosines.  Figuring out exactly where to
put a train car when it's crossing from a left curving arc to a right curving
arc of a different radius is fun!!  
        The only part of the image that I'm really dissatisfied with is the
aliasing on the buildings in the background.  If I'd designed the textures
differently, maybe thrown in some dust so the adaptive aliasing routine would
give them deeper aliasing... but I ran out of time.  The final render is still
going and I really hope it finishes soon so I can submit it before the
deadline!!!  (I have this horrible feeling a bolt of lightening is going to
strike and everything is going to crash.)
        What else... Every thing in this image has been modeled exclusively for
this image... not because I'm insane, but just because I'd never done any
povray work before.  I'm sure the next time I submit it won't be all original. 
I will probably continue to work on my train track engine because it could
really be better.  Probably I will add functions to manipulate track trees, so
they will be easier to edit.  If you know what you want the track to look like
ahead of time, it's relatively simple, but if you create a track and then want
to add a branch point somewhere in the beginning everything goes to pot.  Not
that it can't be done, but it becomes a major headache.  So that needs work. 
And my train layout engine could also be expanded.  
        Inspiration for building design was gotten by perusing "Above San
Francisco" by Robert Cameron and Herb Caen, a book of aerial photographs of San
Francisco I got from a local used book store.  Excellent resource.  It really
helps to look at real objects since people put a lot of time into designing
them.  I also got building and car etc. color distributions from this book.