TITLE: After snowfall
NAME: Peter Murray
COUNTRY: England
EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pdmtown.jpg
ZIPFILE: pdmtown.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    POV-Ray 3.1g.r1 Macintosh PPC

TOOLS USED: 

    POV-Ray's built-in editor,
    and Adobe Photoshop to convert the Pict file to JPG, and edit maps.

RENDER TIME: 

Time For Parse:    0 hours  0 minutes  40.0 seconds (40 seconds)
Time For Trace:    1 hours 23 minutes  26.0 seconds (5006 seconds)
    Total Time:    1 hours 24 minutes   6.0 seconds (5046 seconds)
REFERENCES:
    Castle by David Macaulay (ISBN 0-00-192158-4)

HARDWARE USED: 

    Apple Macintosh G3 300MHz Desktop, now with 256Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

    A mediaeval walled town in the snow as the sun sets.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I didn't like any of the early ideas I had for this round.  For some
reason, this occurred to me as a variation on one of them (a Victorian
scene of a street around Christmas time).

I'd tried making a village setting, and then a mediaeval city setting,
as the themes in two previous years.  Neither got very far.  This time,
I had a better idea of how not to do a town.  The "Castle" book was used
to model the various elements of the castle and the town wall, and I wrote
a macro to construct wooden-framed houses.  The macro doesn't produce
houses as detailed as I would have liked, but it should be Ok for this
scene.  All the buildings are newly-modelled for this scene; the roof
code for the houses was taken from the old "Unbelievable" round, but
had to be almost completely rewritten to work.

Lights in the houses use a random seed to decide whether to be lit or
not.

I made a simpler non-posable version of my human figure, but I didn't
end up using any of them in this scene, and the files aren't included.

The snow texture came from my entry in the "Warfare" round.  The sky is
modified from the one I used in the "Wilderness" round.

The ground is two heightfields with a river shape cut out using Photoshop,
and a box for the water.  The background hills are rescaled versions of
the heightfields before the river was cut out.  I haven't included the
Targa files for these, as (a) they're large (b) the code to recreate them
is in the pdmtown.inc file anyway.

Positioning of the various buildings etc on the heightfields was done by
using the trace function from a beta of POV-Ray 3.5.  Unfortunately, this
mysteriously crashed on the 29th of April and I couldn't get it to work
to get the positions of all the dozens of houses vertically!  I got it
working again the next day, but that was the day it expired... fortunately
I had a version of MegaPOV which was happy to run and find the y values
I needed.

My original attempt to build the roads wasn't working, and has been
commented out in the code.  A texture map has been used to show the road
texture instead.

I think that's all.  The town isn't finished - maybe I'll use it as a
background in a future entry, and add more detail to it then.  The spaces
enclosed by the houses are used for growing vegetables and grazing animals
in the book - the snow has covered up any trace of this.  Besides, I
didn't get as far as modelling things like that!

Almost all of the testing code is still hiding in the pdmtown.inc file,
and would be rendered by setting the Testing variable to the test number;
other parts of the scene can be turned on or off by flags near the top
of the file.
As usual, the actual .pov file is my standard "empty shell" which positions
lights and camera and calls the include files, but doesn't contain any
of the scene.