TITLE: The Night Before Switch On
NAME: Justin Whitton
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: justin.whitton@bigfoot.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.bigfoot.com/~justin.whitton
TOPIC: Landmarks
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jwlndmrk.jpg
ZIPFILE: jwlndmrk.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows v3.1g (Visual C++ engine)

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 5

RENDER TIME: 
    1h 26m

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 450MHz 128MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Centuries after the Great Atomic Disaster made most of the planets surface a
desolate wasteground, humankind discovered the key to vast quantities of cheap,
clean energy.

The two hundred metre Spatial Phase towers are now a common landmark in towns
(often pinpointing the town centre in more recent towns) and at environmental
decontamination areas.

Here we see a Police patrol leaving the Fire Lake Environmental Decontamination
project the night before the official activation. (However the five month test
period has shown that the project will be completed well within the planned 50
years.)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This started as an exercise in using POVray's radiosity features (having never
used radiosity before) and I had built the hover tank out of parts from one of
my projects that was never finished.

Having been working on the hover tank, the idea for this Landmark round of the
IRTC was obvious, have the tank on a road, with the road providing a sense of
scale for a large man made landmark in the background.

The tower was designed from the ground upwards using CSG (as was the rest of the
scen) with no clear idea of how it would finish (my scenes tend to be evolved
rather than planned, :-) the glow on the 13 tower lights are all created with
point lights, each encased in a sphere containing emitting media, the other 110
lights in the scene are all spot lights. ( 4 lights on each of the two tanks 
there is a tank under the tower itself, you can see it as a bright speck in
front of the viewer , 12 on  under  the tower illuminating the ground
immediately beneath it, 68 around the 'island' illuminating the rest of the
ground not covered by the previous 12, and 22 on the bridge acting as street
lamps.)

The sky colouring is done with a gradient coloured sky sphere with a low density
ground fog of the same colour (at 'sea' level) providing a blend so there is no
harsh "horizon line". The "stars" are a hemi-spherical shell of ambient 1
spheres (all of uniform size, distance & anti-aliasing providing the
differences in size and brightness).

The hardest part was adding the signature to the image, it should have been a
simple process but a bug in the version of POVray I was using (3.1d) meant that
bump_maps were not rendered properly. I wasted days before I found out 3.1g was
out and then it worked first time as expected.