TITLE: Old Meets New
NAME: Hildur Kolbrun Andresdottir
COUNTRY: Iceland
EMAIL: hildurka@simnet.is
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: old_new.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, Photoshop, Corel Draw

RENDER TIME: 
    08h43m52s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Amd Athlon 1200 mHz, 512 mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Old meets new. We see it everywhere, all the time. In our towns and cities, old
buildings and new buildings side by side. Sometimes these buildings live in
harmony, sometimes it is almost like they scream at each other. There are
millions of examples to be found throughout the world, but I chose this one
simply because this particular mosque was seen frequently on my T.V. screen
during the "shoch and awe" operation.

This is the Al Wya Mosque in the center of Baghdad and next to it is The Arch of
the Unknown Soldier. The people of Baghdad now face a historical point in time,
the old is meeting the new. Let_s just hope that the new brings security,
happiness and prosperity to them.

The mosque stands firmly on the ground, deeply anchored in the tradition and the
old. At the same time this more modern monument seemes almost about to
levitate, giving new breeze and hope of the future. The earth meets the sky.

I don_t know when either was built, it is difficult to find any useful
information about anything cultural in Iraq. My reference photo was taken in
1968, some 35 years ago. Only a couple of days ago I found out that they later
repainted the mosque and the vault now has a different pattern on it, in
turquoise and gold.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I only started this scene some 2 weeks ago and I honestly wasn_t sure I was
going to finish on time.
I wanted to include more buildings in the background but had to do with more
trees instead.

The modelling part is mostly CGFs. The mosque is not very detailed and it does
not look good up close. The vault is a rot sweep with "shadow off" to avoid the
self shadow artifact.

I spent a lot of time on the textures, trying to make them more "dirty" but
somehow radiosity always seems to wash away my dirt. I used bitmaps for the
patterns on the mosque and the tower. I made the patterns in Corel Draw as an
estimate to what I could make out from the reference photo. I made one strip up
of the pattern, and duplicated side by side up to the right amount to encircle
the form. That way I didn_t need to make any major adjustments to the textures
in Moray. 
The holes in the green grid on the tower wall were made  by using a simple
hexagon texture pattern. The texture on the arch is a birck bitmap with several
layers of dirt on top.

In the distance I put some ground fog to simulate sand storm. The trees come
from the MakeTree macro. It wasn_t designed for palm trees but I couldn_t find
any decent palm tree macro so these have to do.

Enjoy!







