TITLE: Skyline
NAME: Dave Shea
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: daves@wkpowerlink.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.ocis.net/~dshea/ddg
RENDERER:    POVRay 3.0, DOS

TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ds_skyli.jpg
ZIPFILE: ds_skyli.zip
TOOLS USED: 
    Moray, POVRay

RENDER TIME: 
    103 hours (many stop/continues, approximate time)
HARDWARE:    486DX/80 w/20 Megs RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


          Skyline is a tribute to the accomplishments of 
          modern-day architects. The incredible skyscrapers
          of today dominate the skylines of larger cities,
          and really inspire a sense of awe in the person
          standing on the street and looking up. This image
          is a picture taken from a person standing downtown
          in the middle of any large city, looking upwards.
          None of these buildings don't exist in real life, 
          they come from deep within my imagination, but
          they easily could.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


          You don't wanna know. Really, you don't. The 
          skyscrapers themselves are an ugly mix of 
          CSG boxes. Except for various higlights like the
          small lamps on the nearest building, that's 
          pretty much all they're made of. 

          The second building on the left has a variating 
          cylinder protrusion/cavity exterior wall all 
          along the outside, which is only subtle, at best.

          The lamps are an interesting story... I didn't
          know how the heck people do foliage in POVRay,
          so I did the only thing I could think of. Each
          leaf is a single Bezier patch. Each stem is a 
          cylindrical Bezier patch, four high. That ate
          up my memory faster than anything, and added, 
          oh, probably 30 hours or so to the render time.

          The plane in the background is a model from an
          older scene I've done, with a cylindrical halo
          smoke trail. The flags are bezier patches,
          carefully texture-mapped.

          The rest is pretty much straight-forward.