"Greg M. Johnson" <gregj;-)565### [at] aolcom> wrote in message 
news:42252bd8$1@news.povray.org...
> Hello, I've been thinking of writing my own city macro.

> I'm wondering which means of adding detail would render faster:

I don't know but I would like to know as well.  I'm also interested in 
adding 'interior' details so that maybe we could see into the closer windows 
a little bit.  In my case, that may preclude mesh2, guess I'd have to think 
about it.

Did you see my 'nice view' WIP in P.B.I?  I pretty extensivly modified Chris 
Colefax's city, and am trying to add more detail now.

One thing I ran into is that the Colefax city buidings are 'narrow' meaning 
if you look at the height of a 'floor' they are pretty small square footage 
wise. This caused me major consternation while I was doing the last Anim 
IRTC; when one of my test renders got to 'ground floor' I suddenly realized 
the buildings were all about 3x normal 'height'.  Anyway, my fix for this 
was to modify the macro so that the same type of building 'only' would be 
generated on one city block, and that there was 0 gap between buildings. You 
can see this in the WIP I posted, I used 3x3 grids, and I plan on extending 
that some.

Thinking about this process, I think it could be used to add a lot more 
detail.  If you had a 3x3 or 4x4 'single building' made of primitives, the 
corners could look different than the 'middle'.  You could stagger the 
various sides so that you could do some interesting skylines.  For example, 
a quick google search for 'skyline' shows that big buildings typically have 
repeating patters but taper some going up:

http://timmerca.com/data/1000/articles/1400/1695-original.jpg

Look at the 5th building from the left, for example, it could be done with a 
8x8 grid with alternating roof heights stepping up.

This isn't as usefull for me, my concept of having a dome of air is that the 
Martians will build RIGHT UP to the edge of the dome, with fresh air and 
normal temperatures being so scarce, but it could be very usefull for 
Manahatten type cities, or with some extensions usefull fo rme.

I've got my macro's all ripped up at the moment, I'm adding a 'tram slot' 
for the Mars city transportation and I'm getting some weird results, I have 
to debug it some.  I can post them when I get it working again if you'd 
like, maybe we can fiddle with as a group process, if Chris is OK with that.

             == John ==

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