TITLE: Forgotten Neighbourhood
NAME: Hildur Kolbrun Andresdottir
COUNTRY: Iceland
EMAIL: hildurka@simnet.is
WEBPAGE: n/a
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: frgotten.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3, Insert Code Plugin, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    2h07m42s

HARDWARE USED: 
    Amd Athlon 1200 mHz, 512 mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This used to be a cozy neighbourhood. 
But now, nobody likes to play here, except the wind.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I wanted to make a scene with dull, cold light. I thought this was in tune with
the topic. I had in mind a place I once visited in Spain, where houses were
actually falling down because all the people had moved to the suburbs and the
center of town was practically empty. 

I decided early on to use ambient light with radiosity to simulate dull overcast
light conditions. So there are no light sources in the scene except the ambient
sky sphere. 

I did lots and lots of test renderings and gradually I found the suitable
radiosity settings. Each rendering took awful long so I cut down all
unnecessary options, like normals. Instead I used pigments to simulate uneven
surfaces. In the brick textures I made the mortar transparent and placed a cube
behind for mortar. This required a very low Error Bound to get the details
right. 

I thought I was loosing contrast so I lowered Count to get black shadows and
more clear colors. This makes the shadows less accurate but helps keeping the
colors from fading too much and I ended up with amazing short rendering times.


To control the amount of light falling on each surface, I placed dark or light
dummy buildings outside the view.

Most of the modeling is CSG_s. I used a heightfield to cut the broken wall and
the street is also a heightfield. All textures are procedural, most of them
have multible layers. All models and textures were made specifically for this
scene.