TITLE: Halifax
NAME: Simon de Vet
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: sdevet@istar.ca
WEBPAGE: http://home.istar.ca/~sdevet
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: halifax2.jpg
ZIPFILE: halifax2.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    POV-Ray, Moray, Rhino, Neopaint, L-View, Easy-Photo

RENDER TIME: 
    about 3 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 266

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

My view of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This is the single most beautiful building in Halifax, and is generally ignored
by everyone. It looks as if it were designed by an expert architect to be
abandoned, and to look perfectly, ideally, abandoned.

It is structures like this that define "The City" to me. The city is not found
in the gleaming towers, but in the decay.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I started the round working on a pretty dull scene of housing in Amsterdam by
the canals. I never got into it, and it wasn't going anywhere. Then, one day, I
took my camera to downtown Halifax, and started taking some photos. When I got
them developed, the image of this building struck me as the perfect
representation of everything I love about the city. Work began anew.

This was my first attempt to render an image from a photo, and I enjoyed the
experience. It's a lot easier than trying to generate something from my own
brane. 

Most of the scene is modelled in Moray, from primitives. EVERYTHING (except the
sign and the graffiti) is generated procedurally. The heightfields (for the
ground, and for the bricks) were generated with procedural POV textures. The
textures are heavily layered and composed (my texture file is about 5000 lines
long). The billboard sign and tires were modelled in Rhino, as was the
graffiti, used to generate the image maps. Neopaint was used to edit the
graffiti images to make them usable as texture maps. The tree in the background
is courtesy of Gilles Tran's tree macro, which is a wonderful tool!

The final image had its contrast slightly adjusted using L-View, and saved in
Jpg format with Easy-Photo.

This was an epic task, and by far the most complex scene I've ever attempted.
The change in stills rules allowed me to experiment with a different aspect
ratio. However, to not exclude those who cannot handle larger images, I kept it
at 600x800, so it can be rotated and viewed just like in previous rounds.

The .zip contains all the imagemaps, heightfields, and .incs to render the
image, straight from the POV code or through Moray. I also included a scanned
version of the photo I took, which is rather nicer than my simple picture.


Thanks go to:

Halifax - (http://www.region.halifax.ns.ca/) - The city which inspired me, and
which I call home, even though I do not live there.

povray.binaries.images - For constant inspiration

Gilles Tran - (http://www.mediaport.net/Artichaud/Tran/gtran.en.html) - For
inspiring images, and for creating the best Tree Macro out there.

Canadian Tire - Who provided the reference photos for the abandoned tires.

Visual Orgasm - (http://www.visualorgasm.com/) - Probably the best of the online
graffiti sites.

Hellifax - (http://www.triple-bypass.com/hellifax/) - A site devoted to Halifax
area graffiti. Very nice.

Art Crimes - (http://www.artcrimes.com/) - Another beautiful graffiti site.

Kibo - (http://www.kibo.com) - "I often consider some type of hovercraft when
there is none in sight."



Simon de Vet, April 30, 2000

