TITLE: Keeping up with the neighbours NAME: Peter Murray COUNTRY: England EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/ TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pdmhouse.jpg ZIPFILE: pdmhouse.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1d Macintosh PPC TOOLS USED: DeskDraw to lay out house floorplan originally, and credits imagemap Adobe Photoshop to convert the image to JPEG, and add credits. MPW Shell editor to edit include files. RENDER TIME: Time For Parse: 0 hours 6 minutes 5.0 seconds (365 seconds) Time For Trace: 4 hours 8 minutes 8.0 seconds (14888 seconds) Total Time: 4 hours 14 minutes 13.0 seconds (15253 seconds) HARDWARE USED: Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop DISCLAIMER: IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Going to unbelievable lengths (or heights) to beat the neighbours. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I can't remember what made me think of it, but basically, so many families in the suburbs are trying to keep up with the neighbours... this family have just taken "keep up" to an unbelievable extreme. I drew up a floorplan of the house, and started modelling it as a CSG object, with the idea that I'd have a good house model for future use in general, not just in the IRTC. I put some detail into the garden, and decorated most of the rooms in different colours, and designated one of the rooms as a starhouse bridge :-) but stopped short of actually furnishing the rooms. You can't see most of that detail - I've been claiming on my Work In Progress webpage that I was putting "unbelievable" effort into invisible detail! (That page is at http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/wip.html by the way.) For context, I wrote a macro that produces houses, and built several streets around the house. I worked out the streets with the Detailed variable set to 0, so most of the code was skipped. When I tried rendering the image with Detailed set to 1, it took an hour (unbelievable!) just to parse the file, and the camera angle meant you couldn't even see most of the streets. So I took most of them out again (basically a matter of changing the limits on some loops). The macro still needs work, but is good enough for this image, for which I just needed rows of suburban houses. The houses are painted in slightly different colours, but they're basically slightly-tinted variations on white (from a popular UK paint range) and you can only see the differences when shadows are cast on the houses. The houses are basically modelled on some of the larger houses around here, and the roads are also UK-type roads. I haven't seen that many picket fences around here, but it was fun to model, so I used it :-) . I'd been working on trying to get believable people modelled in POV for a while now. They're still not believable in close-up, but the scale of this image meant they'd only be in the distance, so I decided to risk it. (I don't want to use exported Poser meshes, since they're so large, and it takes ages to parse them. There are also copyright problems in using them - eg, they can't legally be included in the zip files.) There are two of the people in this picture - I know where they are, and I still can't see one of them! I had an entertaining couple of days working on the textures. However, once I put them into the image, I had the same problem as I had the previous times I used that tree - anti-aliasing kills the leafy texture. (I did refine the tree from the previous version, though.) Other textures would probably benefit from anti-aliasing, though they look better than they did in the first 800x600 draft render. However, it's 2:30 am on the day after the deadline, and it took four and a quarter hours to render it without anti-aliasing, so I don't have time to rerender it and make the tree look worse! It's unbelievable the way I can spend so much time on an image and still wind up rerendering it on the deadline day! Have I said Unbelievable enough times, do you think :-) ? 10pm on the deadline day, and I'm just starting what I hope will be the final render. The credits aren't a part of the image, because I couldn't get the imagemap to work out, and I can't spend any more time on it. Scene contains 13861 frame level objects; 1 infinite. Isn't that nice to know? Well, people seem to quote that detail in their text files, so I thought I would too. The zipfile doesn't include the human figure file, the teddybear or a file which sets up definitions for the human figure file. That's because: The human figure file still needs a lot of work, and I don't admit to having written it in its present state! The teddybear has been in my zipfiles before, and it's not exactly important in this scene, is it? The definitions file is pointless without the human file. I think I've included all the other files.