EMAIL: peter@table76.demon.co.uk
NAME: Peter Murray
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Keeping up with the neighbours
WEBPAGE: http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/POV/
COUNTRY: England
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.