TITLE: Chrysler Rising
NAME: Bob Chmilnitzky
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jjaguar@worldnet.att.net
WEBPAGE: http://home.att.net/~chmilnir
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: chrysler.jpg
ZIPFILE: chrysler.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3a, HamaPatch 2.9, Paint Shop Pro 5

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 49 minutes 5 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6-2 400mhz, 320 meg RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The Chrysler Building nears completion in 1930, providing stark contrast as
turn-of-the-century old New York makes way for modern skyscrapers in classic
jazz-age Art Deco styles.  Clad in shiny steel and gargoyles inspired by the
automobile, this masterpiece of Art Deco design will soon overshadow the city
as a gleaming monument to the machine age, along with the neighboring Chanin
building with it's own classic Art Deco setback silhouette.  Together they
symbolize the eternal optimisim of the day, ironically just months before the
stock market crash that will plunge the country into the Great Depression.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This image evolved a lot from the initial concept.  The picture was originally
intended to be an aerial view, taken from an airplane and looking down on the
top of the nearly finished building.  But after blocking in the basic scene, I
wasn't satisfied.  I tried moving the camera to various positions and settled
on this one after seeing an old postcard of the Chrysler building from a
similar vantage point.  Something that struck me while looking at these old
photos was the near total absence of skyscrapers in the New York skyline.  The
focus of the image now is less on the Chrysler itself and more on the
transition between the old and new architectural styles.

The foreground buildings are not modeled after any particular structures (except
for the Mori, which is based on a real restaurant that went out of business in
the late 30's), but combine elements from many buildings I found in photos from
various sources on the web.  In particular, Forgotten New York
(www.forgotten-ny.com) and the online photograph collection of the Getty Museum
(http://www.getty.edu) were indespensible in that respect.  Most of the
"neighborhood" are basic block-style turn of the century buildings, with
slightly older Federal-style buildings at the end of the street.  To give each
building a unique look, I created each one independently without copying
anything from previously made buildings whenever possible.

For the most part, the buildings are all ordinary CSG.  Since the foremost
building is closest, it had to be the most detailed.  I modeled it's bricks
individualy as an array of cubes.  The relief in the crown is a heightfield I
drew in PSP.  There are some rooms inside the windows, but I deliberately left
them dark so as to not draw the viewers attention away from the focus of the
scene.  (The room in the second window on the right is the most easily visible
because the curtains are drawn back.)  The curtains were done in Hamapatch. 
The walls are wallpapered with a repeating floral pattern drawn in PSP.  There
is also an interior door and some furniture that is CSG.

The rest of the neighborhood buildings didn't need to be as detailed as the
foreground building, so they are simply using a brick block pattern texture.  A
plain brick pattern caused a moire pattern in the texture, adding an agate
pattern on the mortar breaks up the pattern and gives the impression of brick
without drawing the outline of every individual block.  To give some natural
variation, the windows are randomly positioned.  Each window has a 25% chance
of being open and if open, are opened a random amount.  The pigeons and the cat
in the window are patches made in Hamapatch.

I couldn't find any color photos of period billboards, the closest I could find
were magazine ads.  (Even though the final render is in grayscale, I needed
color ads because I want to be able to also produce a color version.)  The
billboards are a composition of images cut from circa 1930 print ads rearranged
to fit a billboard aspect ratio.  The advertising painted on the buildings are
boxes with a layered texture - a bitmap drawn in PSP underneath, and a nearly
transparent brick pattern on top.  This gives the suggestion of worn paint over
brick.  These ads were copied from similar ads visible in period photos.

The Chrysler building itself is also CSG, depicting the building a couple of
months before completion and shortly before the hauling out of it's 165-foot
spire.  I luckily happened to catch a documentary about the Chrysler a week and
a half before the round's deadline that greatly helped with the layout of the
internal girder structure and scaffolding.  The workers on the scaffolding and
ironwork are the same people I used to populate the pier from my Old Technology
entry.  They are made up of simple spheres and cylinders because they are so
far away that they're practically invisible, so any detail would be lost.

To achieve the mood I want, the scene is set on a gloomy, overcast day.  The sky
is a skysphere with a nearly uniform blue-gray gradient and clouds created
using the "stacked planes" method.  Some fog helps set the mood, and give the
farther buildings a sense of depth.  Rendering the scene in grayscale also
helps give the scene a cold feel.  To achieve an old photograph look, I used a
modified version of the same dirty/grainy lens filter I used in "Bluebird V". 
To darken the corners, I placed the camera within a hollow cylinder that has a
translucent bozo texture.

The final render was converted to .jpg in PSP.  Just for fun, I put a small
render of the scene in color and without the film grain in the .zip.