TITLE: London Gallery
NAME: David Morgan-Mar
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: mar@physics.usyd.edu.au
WEBPAGE: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~mar/
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dmcontra.jpg
ZIPFILE: dmcontra.zip
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1g
TOOLS USED:
  PaintShop Pro 5.1 (jpeg conversion)
  graph paper, pencil
  Eyewtiness Travel Guide: London, Dorling Kindersley, 1993
RENDER TIME: approx. 4 hrs
HARDWARE USED: Pentium II 350MHz, 64MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
A view in a London gallery, showing a contrast between a painting of
St Paul's Cathedral, and the real thing seen out the window.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
No, that's not an image-map...

I tried to get several different contrasts into this image. The basic
split is between an interior and an exterior view. The subject of each
half of the image is the same, but one is a painting, the other
reality. The painting shows a view of history, in wartime, with a
dominating red, smoky colour scheme. The window shows the present day,
in peace, with a bright blue sky. Another contrast, between the 334
year old cathedral and the modern NatWest Bank skyscraper and other
buildings, is seen out the window. Finally, but probably most
importantly to me, this image shows two contrasting ray-tracing styles
that I use: realistic and impressionistic.

The painting is all CSG and procedural texturing. The lines are
cylinders. I sketched a drawing of the cathedral on graph paper, and
entered all the coordinates for the lines in by hand. The colouring
is done with a group of squashed spheres, scaled and rotated variously
and filled with coloured emission media. The painting is based on a
famous World War II photograph taken of St Paul's Cathedral during
the London Blitz. The objects are *there* in the final render. I
could have rendered it separately and made it an image map, but doing
it this way seems somehow more pure to me.

The picture frame is a set of prisms. I sketched the cross-section
of the frames on my wedding photos and coded in the coordinates for
a cubic spline prism. The plaque is fairly simple CSG with text
objects cut out to form the words.

The buildings are all CSG, based on photographs from my research.
There's not really much to say about them, except I used triply
nested pigment maps to produce the cathedral dome texture, which
was a first for me. There's a lot of layered textures there too.

As usual, all this is hand-coded in the POV-Ray text editor,
and all the source code is in the zip file.