TITLE: Europe after the rain
NAME: VALLET Pierre
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: p_vallet@club-internet.fr
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: aft_rain.jpg
ZIPFILE: aft_rain.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 3D

TOOLS USED: 
    City modelling under Softimage

RENDER TIME: 
    (??) about 3-6h I guess

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII-450 Ram 256Mo

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Remnants of a big proud city after Chemical Pollution/Melting
of polar Ice/Nuclear Winter...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    I had to build this town for the
video part of an Opera called "le regard de Lync_e" composed by Fran_ois Ribac,
a piece dealing with the whereabouts of the act of technologically-aided vision
(through/in things... like Lyncaeus the greek hero). The project involved
making a 3'30'' animation under Softimage, and went from the above view of a
city, fly-over and tracking a human shape in this place, then analysing it,
then going through its vessels and smaller and smaller until finally one could
not see anything anymore but a few electrical exchanges (mind? soul?)... The
map of the city itself, which was to be uninhabitable and cold, was build over
the shape of a human iris.
This was a several months hard work, and at the end of it I was exhausted,
unable to do anything else because I was still "possessed" by the project. So
as a kind of therapy I decided to "destroy" that terrible city, thereby testing
the texturing capabilities of Bryce. After importing the city via DXF into
Bryce, I destroyed it by finely tuning a technological (procedural) texture.
The work was achieved mainly through subtle use of alpha blending and some
"bumping" giving increased detail to still opaque parts, (while making it an
expensive texture to render, but this was not anime anymore;).
Then a greenish fog for tha toxic look, then flooding and that was it. I decided
to stop at that (easy) point because the atmosphere was exactly what I wanted:
stillness, decay, and a deliciously sinister atmosphere. I do also appreciate
the "paradoxical" aspect of the image. On the overall and in the background, a
very "realistic" feel, even though the foreground is very abstract in nature,
showing off the procedural aspect of the texture. This IMHO helps seeing that
view as a fiction, which will hopefully never come true.
Signature added in Photoshop.