EMAIL: tonyv@iafrica.com
NAME: Tony Vrnjas
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: The 'Third World' City
COUNTRY: South Africa
WEBPAGE: 
RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.1g
TOOLS USED: PSP 4.0 for creation of height field, file conversion, copyright notice and 10% contrast adjustment.
RENDER TIME: 3h 23m 47s
HARDWARE USED: P166, 64Mb, Windows NT 4.0 SP 6a
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: There is a fly-over along the Foreshore in Cape Town. Although part of it is not yet complete. Construction of the last kilometer or so was put off, they say, because of the owner of a little shop who would not sign over his air-space rights about twenty years ago.

And people do live beneath them in shacks.

So, a small shanty town in the middle of a big city. Early on a Sunday morning and nobody is  out and about. The wind isn't blowing. And there are no cars on the flyover because ... well, it goes nowhere.

But this picture is all imaginary. For a start, it is all far too clean. A couple of days with the Cape Doctor (a southeasterly wind) blowing, and Cape Town looks like one big trash heap. 

I am not 100% happy with the picture, and I guess that I will be tweaking it over the next few days. Once finished it may end up on a website somewhere.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: No fancy tricks here. All done with the official POV windows release (3.1g). No MegaPOV magic. Everything is hand-coded in the POV editor.

A basic scene was set up using boxes of different colours to represent the objects. These were then replaced with the proper objects and then textured. I made and kept numerous images, and POV script files, that show the progress of the scene over time.

A macro was written to output the corrugated sheets. The mathematics of this had me scrambling around the web looking for more information. It turned out OK though. There is also a macro for the lampposts. Although it is functional, it needs a lot more work.