TITLE: San Francisco Bay Area, AD2327
NAME: Alan Langford
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: jal@ambitonline.com
WEBPAGE: http://members.xoom.com/studio9151
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sf2327.jpg
ZIPFILE: sf2327.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray

RENDER TIME: 
    55h 33m 47s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel P3@300Mhz, WinNT

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

What will "suburbs" mean 3000 years from now? This is one vision, a huge orbital
city over the San Francisco Bay area. This image is much less developed than I
might have liked: the original intent was to populate the scene with spacecraft
traffic, and to improve the detail on the tops and core of the "city blocks".
The time required to produce a final render has scrapped those plans (over 3
trillion intersections per render!), so here it is.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The background is a sattelite image of the bay area, courtesy NASA. In order to
reduce the image complexity, the city blocks are created at three levels of
detail: the closest blocks have room interiors, the next level just has window
faces, and the last level is just a uniform box. One problem with this image is
that the uniform boxes are a little too bright.

All the blocks are framed with a metallic material, constructed from cylinders
and spheres. The more detailed blocks are composed of triangle meshes.
Originally, I was using the box {} object to create the units, but
parsing/rendering times were many, many times slower.

The size and lighting values of each unit in the block are defined through use
of random numbers, with some special tricks to reduce the number of textures
required for the meshes, and some tricky logic to ensure that corner units have
the same lighting values on each corner.