EMAIL: ady_@mailcity.com
NAME: Adrian Lazar
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Underwater City
COUNTRY: Romania
WEBPAGE: members.tripod.com/~lazara5
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1a (Windows)
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.2, sPatch, SEA 1.3 for conversion to JPEG
RENDER TIME: 1 hour 28 minutes
HARDWARE USED: AMD K6-2/400, 32 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

        Do you get the feeling this place has become a little too overcrowded?
Are you bored of getting into traffic jams every day? Or having to breathe the
same noxious gas we used to call "air"? Or, maybe, you feel that endless blue
sky is starting to get on your nerves?
    Wait no more! This is the chance for a new life!
    Underwater Inc. is proud to be the first to bring you the solution you've
all been waiting for: THE CITY. But wait, not just an ordinary city. The Earth
is more than 70% water, after all... Did you get the idea? Then what are you
waiting for? Grab the phone and give us a call. Be the first one to...

    Actually yes, it is an underwater city. Maybe not very original, but I
sure had a lot of fun building it. And I didn't even have to get my hair wet
to do it. Boy, modern technology sure is great!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

    This is going to be my second entry to IRTC. I was going to submit to some
of the previous rounds, but somehow I wasn't able to finish any of those
entries in time (maybe if I had a couple of weeks more... I'm pretty sure you
know the tune). Now, since I have managed to upgrade my hardware to a more
decent (and already outdated...) configuration, I said to myself: 'Let's give
it one more try...'.
    After trying a few different approaches to underwater scenes, I decided
for a simple one (no, even my recent hardware isn't going to be able to render
atmospheric effects on a reasonable scale). So, I encased the whole scene into
a hollow cube placed just a little ahead of the camera. The effect is quite
satisfactory, although I wish I had a little bit more time to play with the
lights. By the way, the scene looks way too bright, since I use a dark filter
on my monitor (at least is supposed to be radiation-proof...). I think you can
get a much better feeling if you turn down the brightness and/or contrast.
    Most of the objects in this scene are mainly CSG. Stand-alone versions of
the diver and of the underwater transport module (that funny looking thing
carying red containers) are included in the archive.
    The plants were modelled in sPatch (model also included). I know there
should have been more of these scattered around, but the parsing time was
already going up way too fast.
    The bubbles are simple collections of spheres, placed by hand at the
appropriate places.
    The diffusion of the light around light sources is simulated by using
hollow spheres filled with emissive media. The bright light cones use no media,
but a simple gradient pigment and a spotlight instead (hey, it looks even
better than the halo I tried to use for the same efect in my previous entry,
and it sure renders a lot faster!).
    I know there are quite a few buildings for something that tries to
qualify as a city, but out there in the real world I think building even
something like this would be quite a challenge. Of course they had to start
with something smaller.

    Well, that's all I had to say for now, have a nice view.
                                See ya soon (I hope).