TITLE: The City
NAME: Jim Knepley
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jknepley@chisp.net
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: thecity.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Carrara

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    5 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6-3/400, 256MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  Your monitor adjustments are critical to the viewing of this image because it
is natively dark.  My monitor claims to have a 2.25 gamma, you may need to
tweak your display if it's too dark / bright.  The image should be nearly black
in the lower left corner, and the car shouldn't stand out very much.  

It's late at night in The City.  A cold wind blows swirles in an alleyway.  This
is the run-down home of a hard working, but yet unsuccessful, newcomer to the
area.  It's a rough part of town, but the rent is cheap and it allows him to
build up his assets before moving to more luxurious surroundings.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This is my first serious project in Carrara.  The scene was originally inspired
by an image in a comic book but bears little resemblance to it now.

The walls and sidewalk are texture maps, everything else is procedural shaders
that I created for this scene.

The tires and trash cans are spline models, everything else either primitives or
vertex models.  The tires are two parts (tread and sidewall), with the tread
being a mix of modelling and procedural bump map.  The trash cans are covered
in a reasonably complex procedural shader.

The papers started their life as a particle emitter converted to a vertex model
so I could tweak the overall look.  A wave deformer was applied to give them
the blown look.

The chain link fence is modelled, not a transparency map.

The car is a vertex model and shaders.  It's largely a shell and doesn't really
have too terribly much detail.  The oxidized paint is a procedural shader.

The graffiti was originally a photo I took of some graffiti on the side of a
building in Denver, added as a decal.

I used Photoshop to adjust the gamma to try and encompass most monitors and add
the title.

The source file is quite large, so it is not included here.

