Strange Suburbs Jack Gritton October 1995 The entire image was authored from scratch using POV 2.2. Like most of my ideas, this started off as something almost entirely different. Thinking about the theme of architecture, I decided to try and bring together all the elements of a modern building in some kind of display case. The original idea was that there would be a brick and a six inch nail, held within a glass display case with chrome fixings. Later, when I came to sketch the case, I decided to make it pyramidial and the balls and rods would form the frame that held the glass in place. I was still seeing a fairly 'ordinary' case, with glass panes fitting snuggly against the wooden rails; my brick and nail visible within. A total change of direction came about when a friend mistook the tiny balls that topped the structure for a cross and proclaimed 'Oh, it's a church'. My perspective shifted and I decided that at this stage (with a crude solid glass pyramid fully inside the frame) the object did look more like an example of modern building design than a small display case. The brass pipes were a brief cursory nod towards holding the thing up (still ignored by the top balls and panes of glass). I cut and sliced the pyramid to achieve something close (but not that close) to the orginal thought of panes of glass. Being fairly happy with the object, I then began to concentrate on it's surroundings and in particular some additional elements that would reinforce the theme of arhitecture. Working initally with Bright_Blue_Sky as a single globe, I built a city 'skyline' that would reflect in the balls. Luckily, this provided a pleasing effect almost instantly but left me with headaches about the sky. I didn't want to cop out and use an image for the background and ended up spending ages over it! I began by using a huge globe to surround the scene. I moved the centre of the globe a long way 'down' so that the y=0 plane slices through only the very top of it. I hoped this would be a good starting point for creating a more realistic sky. At this stage I was using Bright_Blue_Sky in its original form. Something still wasn't quite right. I knew it was the illusion of distance but couldn't think how to create it. The answer came in two parts, the first making the second an easy leap. My first thought was to make the blue of the sky a gradient from white at the horizon, through a mid blue up to a darker blue at the very top. Cloudy skies always seem to make the horizon white. To do this I had to modify Bright_Blue_Sky, replacing the blue colour with Clear and then creating a gradient y globe directly behind my cloud globe. Since the 'sky' is only the very top of a much bigger sphere, the gradient colour maps are all in the 0.9s. This was better but still didn't look right. The clouds went all the way to the horizon and I realised I needed some way to stop them (naturally) above this point. After ages looking for a complex way the answer was deceptively simple. I made the cloud sphere bigger than the 'sky' sphere and dropped it's centre. The clouds now appeared to fade out into the white at the horizon. I spent a little time creating an image map for the 'skyscrapers' but in honesty I don't know whether this really adds anything to the scene. You have to look pretty close to even see anything's there. I put a 'cracked mud' type effect on the ground and that was that! Jack Gritton shellgrip@cix.compulink.co.uk London, England October 1995