EMAIL: hgregory3@aol.com NAME: Hugh S. Gregory TOPIC: Contrast COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Before and After COUNTRY: CANADA WEBPAGE: RENDERER USED: Povray 3.1 TOOLS USED: Moray 3.1, Leveler Demo, sPatch, 3D Win, Tree Designer, Paintshop Pro Demo RENDER TIME: 21 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium Pro 160 Mhz, 40megsRAM; PentiumII 350Mhz, 196megs RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Just recently Anne and I travelled in the Eastern Mediterrean part of Europe and I was astonished to see the changes that had occurred since my 1st visit to the Eastern Med as a student back in 1972. It was my observations of these changes that had occurred in the interveining 28 years that led me to my interpretation of the November-December 2000 IRTC Stills theme "Contrast". There are many "Contrasts" in the world around us. But one which quite easily escapes the attention of many, unless you are a well travelled person or one of middle age or older, is the abrupt way in which our cities and their environments drastically change if you are away for a long time. - Before and After - The Story Line The view is from the reading room in my new apartment, early on a summer's morning, looking south over the old historic buildings in the centre of "Parr Town". Many years ago, before I left home to explore the world and find great adventure, I climbed to the roof top of one of the buildings over looking "King's Circle" in the centre of "Parr Town" and took a photo of the place I grew up in. (my parents house is the Blue row house on the right hand side of the circle.) This photograph accompanied me where ever I travelled, so that I could show those I met in my travels my home town and where I grew up. Coming home 23 years later I find that the quaint and rustic old Parr Town of my youth, with the Majestic Mountains soaring in the distance, is now only a memory. The discovery of the new lightweight super strong metal "UnObtainium" (required for spacecraft construction) in the near by hills, triggerd an urban development explosion that changed Parr Town from a sleepy agricultural town into a booming metropolis. My home is still there along with all of the King's Circle buildings, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Parr Town Historical Buildings Preservation Society. But the view of the Majestic Mountains is now obstructed by towers of glass, concrete and steel reaching for the sky. And what I can glimpse between these monsters is often reduced to a fuzzy out line by the thick smog and air pollution from the smelters that now chokes the our valley. So I decided prop a new print of that old photo that accompanied me around the world in my reading room window and take another photo to show you the sharp the Contrast of the changes 23 years of development have brought to Parr Town. I've named this image appropriately "Before and After", a study in Contrasts. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first solo IRTC entry. With the exceptions noted below all structures and features in this image were built and artictically placed in this image by myself. When the topic was announced in the 1st week of November, a "Before and After" scene quickly came to mind as an ideal "Contrast". Stage 1: This image was constructed in a two stage project. Stage One started with a trial and error process to try out several possible city layouts for my planned town and eventual city. I ended up with circular town with 3 rings of streets and buildings for the "Before" image. These were done with CSG differences to make the circular sidewalks and roads. With the "survey" layout of the inner old part of town in place, I started to build buildings with CSG's and primitives to surround "King's Circle" and Anne designed and built the marble ledges and strips that were to run along the tops and under the windows of the commercial buildings. The I began "flying" a camera around the town centre, doing many test renders to find the best place to "shoot" my image from. Anne recommended a small park at the centre of King's Circle and a planted and treed median strip down the centre of the road surrounding King's Circle. So I added a park, sidewalks and fences and she built the trees. She built two different kinds of trees and shrub bushes, as well as a park bench and a rubbish pail for the little circular park at the centre of King's Circle. I finally settled on a roof top view from the north side of 2nd ring looking south. This would do the job as this building would be replaced with a higher one in the finishing stages to allow the final image to be a photo taken out of a window now located were the roof top was in the old image. Next I experimented with various textures to get the "right look" for the sidewalks and roads. The roads took two textures, one a cobbled stone for Stage One and the other a paved blacktop with painted traffic control lines and car parking stalls marked out on it for Stage Two. Mountain Construction. While I was placing and doing repeated test renders to get the buildings artistically place, Anne used the leveler Demo to build the back drop of the Majestic Mountains. I then took her mountain and made multiple copies of it, which I rotated to lots of different angles and then assembled them into two mountain ranges. The first mountain range is the low one in the foreground, which I covered with a green and black image map heavily bumped to produce a forested hill effect. The rear ward mountain range was copied and differenced so that the upper half could be textured to produce snow capped mountains, while the lower half was textured with a black and grey bumped image map to produce rough bare rock faces for the lower part. In King's Circle and the street leading to it I installed wooden post street lights and trees and bushes on the median strip in the next street out. The trees can be seen peaking over the tops of the buildings. Completing the First Stage was a flat plain with a Dry Grass bump map was added between the edge of Parr Town and the mountains in the back ground to give a rural town setting feel to the place. A clear blue sky sphere was added and the sun positioned for mid summer afternoon illumination to complete the scene. The old "Parr Town" image was then rendered at 800 by 600 with antialaising and saved as in PNG format. Stage 2: Then I set about demolishing all the structures in two of Parr Towns three outer rings of buildings. I then designed and installed a new layout following a standard city block grid system for the "New" parts of Parr Town. Then a combination of glass and steel, and glass and concrete high rise office towers were constructed. These had to be placed all around King's Circle as test renders initially showed that the glass high rises showed reflections of the buildings behind the camera in their windows. When a satisfactory final image layout was achieved, I replaced the wooden street light posts with modern curved green steel ones and replaced the cobble stone road with paved blacktop, complete with lane lines and parking stalls. The lane lines in the circle where were done by differencing a cylinder. The final part of Stage Two was to make a desk calendar, parking meters and a picture frame for the "old" Parr Town image. First I built an 11 by 14 wooden picture frame using CSG's and primatives and placed the old "Parr Town" bitmap image in the window to one side. On it I placed a brass plaque inscribed "Parr Town - July 20, 1977". Next came parking meters for King's Circle, these are just barely visible but a zoom will show they are there. Finally to complete The Contrast I then built an old style brass drum calendar and placed it in the bottom foreground on the window ledge. Of the 50 plus buildings and other items constructed for this entry Only 3 are prebuilt, preused items and they are just visible at bottom left and right for image balance and story purposes. I imported the telephone, the file rack and the top of the desk used in our IRTC "GeoLab" entry. The 800 by 600 BMP took just over 21 minutes to render on POV using my Pentium II - 350. The resulting BMP was converted into a JPG with a Demo version of Paint Shop Pro Anne downloaded off the internet set to 2% compression to get the file down under 250kb. Although there is no longer a image size limitation, our experience judging the Sept-Oct stills round has led us to conclude that these parameters do make for ease in displaying the IRTC artwork for judging, so we have decided to stick with them. I Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright "Before and After" is Copyright(c)2000 Hugh S. Gregory, All Rights Reserved World Wide.