TITLE: Utopia Eclipsed
NAME: Shay
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: shay@simcoparts.com
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: adland.jpg
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!


