TITLE: Nigth City
NAME: Jaime Vives Piqueres
COUNTRY: Valencia, Spain
EMAIL: jaime@ctav.es
WEBPAGE: http://www.ctav.es/jaime/index.html
TOPIC: THE CITY
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: night.jpg
ZIPFILE: night.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g for Linux ((C) POV-Team)

TOOLS USED: 

- Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 (libs upgraded here and there...)
- KDE 1.1 ((C) KDE Team), as window manager.
- Kwrite ((C) Jochen Wilhelmy), to write the POV scripts (anyone knows
  a simple X text editor with macros? Not xemacs, please!)
- The Gimp ((C) S.Kimball and P.Mattis), to convert PNG to JPG, and for 
  some image painting/editing (*before* rendering!:).

RENDER TIME: 
    24'10''

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel P-III, 667 Mhz, Intel CC820 m.b., 128MB RAM.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  Night view of a (uknown) city, taken from the industrial suburbs road.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  As someone pointed on irtc-l, I needed an excuse to make a city without
people. I tought inmediately on a nigth scene, of course. Later, other 
list member suggested a suburbs view. I joined both things and decided to 
try a night view of the city, from the suburbs. So in the foreground,
I don't need to put people (Well, finally I've placed some simple models 
at the distance, to "humanize" a bit the scene...).

  Using rough and simple shapes, I tried several arrangements and views. 
When I found the rigth composition (basically the same as finally used), 
and decided that this was my scene for this round, I started the "serious" 
and slow creation of details. All is done with my usual techniques (mostly
CSG and HF), using macros and rand() a lot to randomize object textures 
and placement.There are too many objects in the scene to describe them. See
the code if you have any curiosity. As usual, all is hand-coded and textured
procedurally, except for the signs and banner ads, wich are image maps.

  I tried several views for the final trace, including the typical "cockpit" 
view, but none worked better than the first one. Anyhow, for some reason, 
the 800x600 proportions looked strange to me, for this view. I cutted the 
image with the Gimp to my ideal size, but this time was the camera point 
who looked strange for the image proportions. Grrr... well, I've finally 
forced the image proportions with a *very-wierd* "right 800/454*x" statement 
on the camera , and adjusted it to obtain the same view. The final image 
composition looks very semablant to the one on the original sketch.

VIEWING TIPS:

  Adjust contrast to the maximum, and brigthness just to barely see the moon 
halo and the smoke columns. Enjoy!


 Jaime Vives Piqueres
 Valencia, April 2000.


