TITLE: Berlin 2000+n - A Bug's View (bgate.jpg) NAME: Jens Dengler COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: jd@surveyor.in-berlin.de WEBPAGE: http://www.in-berlin.de/User/jd/ TOPIC: City COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: bgate.jpg ZIPFILE: bgate.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.1g.Linux.gcc TOOLS USED: GIMP (heightmaps, images, tga-jpg) RENDER TIME: 2h+ HARDWARE USED: Pentium 133MHz 32MB EXPERTS DON'T HAVE TO READ FURTHER. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image is a picture of the most used, misused, and photographed monument of my own city - the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin - with an a bit unusual perspective. I'm somewhat disgusted that any greasy media is using the gate as its capital icon, therefore I'm using it, too. The image shows an early spring early morning view of the gate, when no tourists are around. Except you, but you are a bug of 3mm height. So what you mainly see is your last night's hotel (an empty lying beer can), a poster, and some strange remnants left by humans. The currently inactive fountain on the Pariser Platz and the traffic regulations you see were made somewhat around 2006. The gateways are closed for any kind of traffic except pedestrians and bicycles (and maybe slow passing emergency vans) like it was already once shortly after reunion and before the car lobby demanded the traffic to go through the gate. In the past this car traffic resulted in many problems. The least problem was that it was difficult to cross the street near the building - not only for bugs. The dark stripes on the center right main pillar of the gate are not imaginary, they are the result of a collision with a bus or truck. At the time of the traffic the gate was crumbling in quick-motion. But with the new regulations the complete collapse could had been prevented. (Well, its not the ruins topic anymore, isn't it?) Still, you might hurry up to leave the street, because the next automobile could be a cleaning vehicle. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Synopsis: povray +w800 +h600 +a0.06 +v -i bgate.pov The main idea was to make as much as everything in CSG. Except for the the reliefs at the tympanons of the side buildings and for the image on the single stand-up information sign this idea became reality. The reliefs are height maps, the "Berlin 2000+n" poster is a mapped texture image, all made with GIMP. The photographies on the imaginary "Berlin 2000+n" poster are my own. The "i-signs" with the pointer to the souvenirs shop exist in reality. The beer's name on the tin can is actually from a beer label within the comic "Neon Genesis Evangelion". My current fav. I'm eagerly waiting for the next volume. I hope this beer label doesn't exist. If it does, it would be a really funny prophecy to have Japanese beer in Berlin in 2000+n, because currently Germany is still picky about the import of non-German beer. You don't see the height map reliefs in the image. The reason for this is: when starting the image I wanted to make a diffent view with looking to the gate from a much higher and a bit more distant position. But when introducing the tin I fell in love with the shown viewpoint. You can create the initially planned view by uncommenting the camera parameter of the "final view" and commenting the parameter of the "bugs view" in the main source. With this final view its also visible that the center tin is lying on a void, overpainted roadway strip. Another funny thing about the final view is that the details in the foreground except the tins are vanishing completely. Making this image I learned a lot, again. Some firsts are the #while directive of PoVRay 3.1 (I like it), the brick texture (rotating it wrong makes a usable footwalk tile pattern, too), the usage of gradients (partly with turbulence - THNX for the hint on water waves), the usage of granite as a normal pattern, the usage of crand, prisms (simply visible in the foreground, but I don't think its as useful as it could be when it would be definable like cylinders within the 3D space), and last but not least an anti-alializing threshold smaller than 0.1 (it was really necessary for the different vertical and horizontal lines in the image). Included into the zip archive is an additional list of colors named xcolors.inc - this is a converted version of the rgb.txt of XFree86, where all doubled color names with lower case letter and blanks in it were removed. A small number of these colors were used in bgate.pov because sometimes I have a more familiar feeling for these names. Still the additional colors weren't enough for the different shades of ochre and pale green in the image. The included naked tree is made with the self programmed tool, again. This time only one simple tree without texture is used and rotated a bit at the different positions to close the views to the horizon (when seen from the "final view" - for the "bugs view" the horizon is closed by the tins). -- jd --