TITLE: Before and After
NAME: Hugh S. Gregory
COUNTRY: CANADA
EMAIL: hgregory3@aol.com
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: banda.jpg
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.

