EMAIL: hildurka@simnet.is
NAME: Hildur Kolbrun Andresdottir
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Forgotten Neighbourhood
COUNTRY: Iceland
WEBPAGE: n/a
RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5
TOOLS USED: Moray 3.3, Insert Code Plugin, Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 2h07m42s
HARDWARE USED: Amd Athlon 1200 mHz, 512 mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

This used to be a cozy neighbourhood. 
But now, nobody likes to play here, except the wind.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I wanted to make a scene with dull, cold light. I thought this was in tune with the topic. I had in mind a place I once visited in Spain, where houses were actually falling down because all the people had moved to the suburbs and the center of town was practically empty. 

I decided early on to use ambient light with radiosity to simulate dull overcast light conditions. So there are no light sources in the scene except the ambient sky sphere. 

I did lots and lots of test renderings and gradually I found the suitable radiosity settings. Each rendering took awful long so I cut down all unnecessary options, like normals. Instead I used pigments to simulate uneven surfaces. In the brick textures I made the mortar transparent and placed a cube behind for mortar. This required a very low Error Bound to get the details right. 

I thought I was loosing contrast so I lowered Count to get black shadows and more clear colors. This makes the shadows less accurate but helps keeping the colors from fading too much and I ended up with amazing short rendering times. 

To control the amount of light falling on each surface, I placed dark or light dummy buildings outside the view.

Most of the modeling is CSG´s. I used a heightfield to cut the broken wall and the street is also a heightfield. All textures are procedural, most of them have multible layers. All models and textures were made specifically for this scene.