TITLE: Ant City.

NAME: Tim Cuthbertson
COUNTRY: Australia.
WEBSITE: I haven't got one yet.


EMAIL: tim_cutho@smileyface.com
TOPIC: City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ant_city.jpg
ZIPFILE: ant_city.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1


TOOLS USED: 
    Paintbrush, Trial version of Rhino, Moray. Imagine it! for jpeg
conversion.


RENDER TIME: 
    Eleven Hours something. (Rendered at 800x600, AA 0.3)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


It's a dark, cold, foggy night in ant city. The only illumination is from
healights and street lights, and Jeffery the ant is walking home from work. To
the left of the screen a car approaches, blinding Jeffery with it's
headlights.
And I don't think there is a city in the whole world without graffiti, so why
should the ants be any different?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Although it would probably have been easier to do all this in moray, there are
just so many things that you need to change halfway through the scene that I
found POV-Ray's macro function very useful.

I started by making the ant. I used the trial version of rhino (where you only
get 25 saves) and made the whole ant there. Since I might have wanted to change
it a bit, I saved it into Moray as a udo. Unfortunately, the legs (which are
just spheres) had exported from rhino as thousands of triangles, and the same
for the eyes. I then spent a while deleting all of these and then replacing
them with spheres in Moray.

My next step was to make the brick wall. This was very difficult, because
although POV-Ray has a brick texture, it just doesn't look real. So I ended up
using a large-scaled bozo pattern, and then using the warp function to get all
different colour bricks in the same area, and then applied a brick pattern to
it (for added realness, i put a wall of mortar bekind the bricks and made the
mortar in between the bricks transparent).

I then made the pavement out of Superellipsoids, but the edges just didn't look
right, so I scripted a simple bezier patch (for the gutter) in POV-Ray so that
I could change the steepness of it.

Then the road was pretty simple. A black, bumpy plane with boxes of white just a
tiny bit above the surface (I also put bumps on this so it looks like the paint
has worn in some places and the black is showing through).

The next step was the lights. I made a streetlamp out of cones, and put a
yellowish spotlight that shines directly down. There still wasn't enough light
in the scene, so I added in two spotlights coming from the left of the road (to
all american people, that IS the correct side for Australia).

The lights were looking a bit dull, so I decided to use something from my
original idea, FOG! 
I tried this with the fog object in POV-Ray, but it just didn't work the way I
wanted it to.
I ended up exploring something I've never come across before, the media feature.
It took a while to get the settings right (I kept ending up with no visible
fog, or the whole picture went white), but eventually I got just the right
amount for a cold night.

Finally, a last touch, the graffiti. I hand-drew it myself in paintbrush with
the spraycan brush, and then used it as a height field with an ambience of 1
and no shadows so it looked flat on the wall. For some reason, when I put it
too close to the wall, there is only a small circle in which the graffiti
appears, everything else dissappears. I still don't know why it happens, so I
have brought the graffiti out from the wall a bit (thus the NO SHADOW is
needed) and it looks fine.

I was given this program called Imagine It! of like a hundred thousand clip art
pics and web animatons. The cool thing is I've found out how to use this
program to open one of my pictures and save it as a jpeg where I can actually
configure the quality and smoothness settings. This is much better than my old
system of using powerpoint to put the picture in, try to get the slide size
right, and then exporting it (no adjustable settings) as a jpeg.

Sorry that the source code in the zip file is so messy, but at least it works!

This is my second entry to the IRTC, and I'm only fourteen, so I'm very happy
with the final result.

