TITLE: Halifax
NAME: Simon de Vet
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: sdevet@istar.ca
WEBPAGE: http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray
TOOLS USED: POV-Ray, Moray, Rhino, Neopaint, L-View, Easy-Photo
RENDER TIME: about 3 hours
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 266
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
My view of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This is the single most beautiful building in Halifax, and is generally ignored by everyone. It looks as if it were designed by an expert architect to be abandoned, and to look perfectly, ideally, abandoned.

It is structures like this that define "The City" to me. The city is not found in the gleaming towers, but in the decay.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I started the round working on a pretty dull scene of housing in Amsterdam by the canals. I never got into it, and it wasn't going anywhere. Then, one day, I took my camera to downtown Halifax, and started taking some photos. When I got them developed, the image of this building struck me as the perfect representation of everything I love about the city. Work began anew.

This was my first attempt to render an image from a photo, and I enjoyed the experience. It's a lot easier than trying to generate something from my own brane. 

Most of the scene is modelled in Moray, from primitives. EVERYTHING (except the sign and the graffiti) is generated procedurally. The heightfields (for the ground, and for the bricks) were generated with procedural POV textures. The textures are heavily layered and composed (my texture file is about 5000 lines long). The billboard sign and tires were modelled in Rhino, as was the graffiti, used to generate the image maps. Neopaint was used to edit the graffiti images to make them usable as texture maps. The tree in the background is courtesy of Gilles Tran's tree macro, which is a wonderful tool!

The final image had its contrast slightly adjusted using L-View, and saved in Jpg format with Easy-Photo.

This was an epic task, and by far the most complex scene I've ever attempted. The change in stills rules allowed me to experiment with a different aspect ratio. However, to not exclude those who cannot handle larger images, I kept it at 600x800, so it can be rotated and viewed just like in previous rounds.

The .zip contains all the imagemaps, heightfields, and .incs to render the image, straight from the POV code or through Moray. I also included a scanned version of the photo I took, which is rather nicer than my simple picture.


Thanks go to:

Halifax - (http://www.region.halifax.ns.ca/) - The city which inspired me, and which I call home, even though I do not live there.

povray.binaries.images - For constant inspiration

Gilles Tran - (http://www.mediaport.net/Artichaud/Tran/gtran.en.html) - For inspiring images, and for creating the best Tree Macro out there.

Canadian Tire - Who provided the reference photos for the abandoned tires.

Visual Orgasm - (http://www.visualorgasm.com/) - Probably the best of the online graffiti sites.

Hellifax - (http://www.triple-bypass.com/hellifax/) - A site devoted to Halifax area graffiti. Very nice.

Art Crimes - (http://www.artcrimes.com/) - Another beautiful graffiti site.

Kibo - (http://www.kibo.com) - "I often consider some type of hovercraft when there is none in sight."



Simon de Vet, April 30, 2000