TITLE: Urban Decay
NAME: Jonathon Rogers
COUNTRY: USA / Iraq
EMAIL: reactor_x@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.detrifuse.net/
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: decayed.jpg
ZIPFILE: decayed.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

RENDER TIME: 
    (estimated) Pre-trace 3 hours Final 9 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    OmniBook PC 700 Mhz 128 Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Does life imitate art, or art life?  Can buildings and cities have lives and
personalities like people, or are they just elaborate shelters to keep us warm
and dry?  Perhaps buildings do not live by themselves, but receive life from
the people that inhabit them.  Like all living things, it will one day die when
the people leave it.  Times change, economies shift, people move, companies
close...


This image is intended to be one of an old, long abandoned industrial building. 
I've noticed how buildings seem to fall apart with amazing speed when
abandoned, just as a the body of a living creature slowly changes over the
years as it lives, but rapidly changes when the creature dies.  One can't help
but liken buildings and entire cities to people... growing rapidly and bustling
in their youth, slowing down over time as things slowly change... One day, it
dies a death of sorts as it no longer serves a purpose to those that once gave
it life...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Viewing warnings:
  This image was created on a laptop, so the gamma might be a bit odd.

I'm rather interested in urban archaeology and happened to find a picture online
that somehow captivated my attention.  When I remembered that the topic was
decay, I had to try to render it.  This image was my first real experiment with
radiosity, so I spent most of the time testing parameters and reading the
docs.

The majority of the image is fairly simple and consists mostly of the basic
primitives (boxes, tori, spheres, & cylinders).  I didn't really have any tools
available except for ones I had been working on before (the sweep and grass
tools).  The idea was to make a fairly simple room but have lots more debris,
but I couldn't quite reach the level intended due to time constraints.
  For object creation, I looked at interior pictures of old buildings online and
sketched what I thought I could render from different angles... not much more
to it really.

Known issues:
The area light needs a higher number of light sources and a higher adaptive
value to get rid of the artifacts on the wall.

The window panes are in the source, but the partially transparent texture
really, really slowed things down when coupled with area lights, atmosphere,
and radiosity.

I felt the walls were too bare for a real abandoned workshop and wanted to put
in a few other things, like old safety signs and graffiti.

The detail of the grass was lost in this image as it was intended to be viewed
at 1000 x 600.

I wanted to give a non-uniform density to the media, but ran out of time.