TITLE: Nigth City NAME: Jaime Vives Piqueres COUNTRY: Valencia, Spain EMAIL: jaime@ctav.es WEBPAGE: http://www.ctav.es/jaime/index.html TOPIC: THE CITY COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: night.jpg ZIPFILE: night.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g for Linux ((C) POV-Team) TOOLS USED: - Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 (libs upgraded here and there...) - KDE 1.1 ((C) KDE Team), as window manager. - Kwrite ((C) Jochen Wilhelmy), to write the POV scripts (anyone knows a simple X text editor with macros? Not xemacs, please!) - The Gimp ((C) S.Kimball and P.Mattis), to convert PNG to JPG, and for some image painting/editing (*before* rendering!:). RENDER TIME: 24'10'' HARDWARE USED: Intel P-III, 667 Mhz, Intel CC820 m.b., 128MB RAM. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Night view of a (uknown) city, taken from the industrial suburbs road. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: As someone pointed on irtc-l, I needed an excuse to make a city without people. I tought inmediately on a nigth scene, of course. Later, other list member suggested a suburbs view. I joined both things and decided to try a night view of the city, from the suburbs. So in the foreground, I don't need to put people (Well, finally I've placed some simple models at the distance, to "humanize" a bit the scene...). Using rough and simple shapes, I tried several arrangements and views. When I found the rigth composition (basically the same as finally used), and decided that this was my scene for this round, I started the "serious" and slow creation of details. All is done with my usual techniques (mostly CSG and HF), using macros and rand() a lot to randomize object textures and placement.There are too many objects in the scene to describe them. See the code if you have any curiosity. As usual, all is hand-coded and textured procedurally, except for the signs and banner ads, wich are image maps. I tried several views for the final trace, including the typical "cockpit" view, but none worked better than the first one. Anyhow, for some reason, the 800x600 proportions looked strange to me, for this view. I cutted the image with the Gimp to my ideal size, but this time was the camera point who looked strange for the image proportions. Grrr... well, I've finally forced the image proportions with a *very-wierd* "right 800/454*x" statement on the camera , and adjusted it to obtain the same view. The final image composition looks very semablant to the one on the original sketch. VIEWING TIPS: Adjust contrast to the maximum, and brigthness just to barely see the moon halo and the smoke columns. Enjoy! Jaime Vives Piqueres Valencia, April 2000.