TITLE: Ruined City
NAME: Gail Shaw
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: gshaw@monotix.co.za
WEBPAGE: http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za/~gail/
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ruincity.jpg
ZIPFILE: ruincity.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Megapov 0.4 (Unofficial compile of Pov-Ray 3.1)

TOOLS USED: 
    Leveller - height fields
            Paint Shop Pro - Height fields and signature
            Vue d'Espirit - Create one of the image maps
            sPatch - The distorted metal pipe and the dustbin
            Moray - The car
            3ds2pov - Convert the skull and arm to pov format
            Plant studio - create the weed in the foreground
            MS Access - Wrote a function to create random, non-overlapping 
                        objects.
            maketree macro by Giles Tran
            fur macro by Margus Ramst

RENDER TIME: 
    Parse time 5 minutes
             Render time: 42 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 450 Mhz 64 MB Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


So what eventually caused it? In truth it doesn't matter. A itchy
trigger finger, a computer glitch, the end result was the same.
Total devestation, armageddon, doomsday. A few hours of fire and smoke,
then silence. Major cities are totally destroyed, smaller ones 
survive with damage and over the years they too disappear.

This scene is set in the suburbs of a medium size city a few 
years after a worldwide disaster.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started with a vague idea of creating a ruined city viewed from an 
alley. First I wrote macros to create the brick walls and the
paving. Next I created the main items in the alleyway. The skull
and arm are meshes. The skull was sent to me by Ken Tyler (no idea
who created it) and the arm is from 3dCafe. The odd shaped stone block
is an isosurface as is the corregated iron. The fallen tree was creatd using
Giles Tran's maketree macro. The twisted pipe and dustbin were created in
sPatch
and the dustbin lid is CSG.

The broken plaster on the wall is the intersection of a two color height field 
and a box.

Once I had finished with the alleyway I created the distant city. It is
created using a simple macro that randomises size and height of boxes and
places
them at random distances from each other (In a type of city block). I used a 
height field to create the broken look of some of the buildings.

The bricks scattered across the road were placed using a MS Access app that I
wrote
oe afternoon. It ensures that objects don't intersect. The car was modelled in
Moray
using bezier patches.

The buildings on the far side of the road were created with the same wall
macro as was used for the alley walls. The gate is composed of several
isosurfaces

The cloud layer was created using SamuelT's layered planes method

The last things I added were the plant (from PlantStudio), the Tarot card - 
Death on a White Horse, and the teddy bear. The bear is made of blobs
and used Margus Ramst's fur include file.

The scene is very dark. I will put a brightened version on my web site
http://www.rucus.ru.ac.za/~gail/images/Ruincitycorrected.jpg