EMAIL: shay@simcoparts.com NAME: Shay TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Utopia Eclipsed COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: none RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Infranview for jpeg conversion RENDER TIME: 42:18 HARDWARE USED: AMD 1.2G IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Art Deco abstract(ish) impressionist industrial landscape. (I can’t wait to see how that goes over here.) This is a post-"Metropolis" landscape. The producers below the ground, instead of overthrowing the parasites above, have simply marginalized them. I attempted to create a basic but extremely purposeful composition. For instance, the buildings are simple and seem to be chaotically arranged, but the corners are beveled and none of the 6,500 buildings intersects another. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image is made completely with POV-Ray sdl. All of the map creation and modeling was done with the keyboard. The one small exception is a map of the planet which I used to shape the continents correctly. My goal was to see what kind of image I could produce with nothing but a blinking cursor. I know now how little time 2 months can be for an employed person when starting from scratch like this. I have been playing with POV-Ray for a couple of years, but have never produced more than a few trivial macros and several half-starts. I started this competition on the first day *determined* to finally accomplish something worthwhile with POV-Ray. I am happy with the results and will have this picture framed in my dining room. On to the specifics. The continents were created first. They are a mesh and are independent of the structure supporting them. I wrote a macro to create the continents which takes a flat map of the planet and produces a 3D mesh with nice rounded edges at the "coast." I perturbed the surface of the mesh just a bit in order to give the land mass a slightly organic look. Only one side of the planet is shown, but I modeled the entire thing in case I ever need it. I then created the structure supporting the land mass. This structure is also a mesh. For this I wrote a macro which creates finds the edges of the continents and creates a uv mapped wall around those edges. Actually it shrinks the edges just a little bit in order to give the continents a little bit of overhang. The structure is not really touching the "ground" either. It has a smooth edge on the bottom and is resting on columns (unseen) which touch the center sphere. I then used cylinders as dummy buildings and wrote a macro to place the cylinders around the continents. The initial result was what I think of as cg mud, a pile of objects intersecting and overlapping each other. I hate this in pictures, so I had to start that part over. Ouch. I wrote a second macro which was able to place the cylinders around the continents with none of them intersecting. When done, I began tweaking the variables and random seeds used in order to create the desired shape and texture of the landscape. After each change, I would check the image from across the room to make sure that the overall shape as well as the texture were correct. This tweaking has reached the point that I have loops which do nothing more than tick off randomly generated numbers until the proper place in the sequence is reached. This is necessary due to my lack of planning and not originally using a separate random seed for each area of the image. I have also hand-edited the list of buildings when three buildings in particular looked out of place or unattractive. Next came the buildings. The buildings are mostly meshes with some CSG. This part of the creation moved a little backwards. I started creating skyscrapers and spent several days making a large variety of skyscrapers with different shapes. I felt really good about what I was doing, because it was by far the easiest part of the scene. When I fed these into my placement macro, however, I felt that the mood of my image had been lost. The look was too chaotic and far from the poster style image I was trying to create. So I began working backwards, decreasing the buildings and simplifying the smaller number of skyscraper types I had until I had reached what I felt was a good balance. The buildings looked a little too sharp and boxy to me at that point, so I inserted a few industrial type towers into my city as an experiment and was very happy with the results. All that was left was the texture and lighting of my scene. I had to try many times before I got a good arrangement of lights. Lighting a spherical model was very difficult for me, and I did not like the look of global lighting on the scene. The textures on this model have been everything from blues to deep reds. I chose the almost monochrome color scheme in the end because it looked less noisy. I used a little media as well to cover up places on the model which looked too busy. I ended up with five tinted point lights illuminating the scene and a variety of finishes rather that a variety of colors. There is some color in the image, but it is very subtle. Jpeg compression stole a little bit of my warm hue as well. The background is just a plane with a bozo pigment and within it’s own light group. Still, I spent hours getting it just the way I wanted it. I did not include the source because it is 26 megs of messy code. If anyone would like to ask me any questions about this picture, I usually read the POV-Ray newsgroups on weekdays. I know that this was a long description, but I enjoy reading other’s descriptions, so I wanted to share everything which I thought might be informative or interesting. Thank you all for having a look. -Shay p.s. Thank you ABX and Tor for all of the trig you have taught me over the past couple of years!