Here's a few images from within the structure.

I added a randomized camera to put the viewer on a random floor, and spent some
time detailing the various components so it stands up to closer scrutiny. This
also revealed a whole slew of placement bugs that didn't really show up on the
distant view. The rails, posts and corner posts are now predeclared meshes, so
parsing time has gone down and the memory footprint should be smaller.

There's still some things I want to improve - there are some big gaps at the end
of the railings in some cases, I'd like to add some textures, and possibly a
couple more objects (e.g. planters). If I can maintain the momentum, I'll also
play with the environment and placement structure a bit...

Bill

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"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Here's a few images from within the structure.
>
> I added a randomized camera to put the viewer on a random floor, and spent some
> time detailing the various components so it stands up to closer scrutiny. This
> also revealed a whole slew of placement bugs that didn't really show up on the
> distant view. The rails, posts and corner posts are now predeclared meshes, so
> parsing time has gone down and the memory footprint should be smaller.
>
> There's still some things I want to improve - there are some big gaps at the end
> of the railings in some cases, I'd like to add some textures, and possibly a
> couple more objects (e.g. planters). If I can maintain the momentum, I'll also
> play with the environment and placement structure a bit...
>
> Bill

Hi Bill,
That's looking great :-) Thank you for sharing !
All the views seem to be on the 'surface' of the structure. I don't know what
your lighting setup is but I presume there is only one light_source outside the
structure. Is it getting too dark as you move deeper inside it ? In that case, I
wonder how it would look like if there was no light outside and light inside
some of rooms instead...
Hope you'll maintain momentum !

Pascal

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"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Here's a few images from within the structure.
>
> I added a randomized camera to put the viewer on a random floor, and spent some
> time detailing the various components so it stands up to closer scrutiny. This
> also revealed a whole slew of placement bugs that didn't really show up on the
> distant view. The rails, posts and corner posts are now predeclared meshes, so
> parsing time has gone down and the memory footprint should be smaller.
>
> There's still some things I want to improve - there are some big gaps at the end
> of the railings in some cases, I'd like to add some textures, and possibly a
> couple more objects (e.g. planters). If I can maintain the momentum, I'll also
> play with the environment and placement structure a bit...
>
> Bill

Bill, that's looking very cool! So much work.

So much there already that, yes, a touch of algorithmically generated planters
(and a big measure of patience) would fill it in nicely. Nothing like 100+ hours
of work hanging on your wall.

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Op 27/11/2021 om 17:53 schreef Bill Pragnell:
> Here's a few images from within the structure.
> 
> I added a randomized camera to put the viewer on a random floor, and spent some
> time detailing the various components so it stands up to closer scrutiny. This
> also revealed a whole slew of placement bugs that didn't really show up on the
> distant view. The rails, posts and corner posts are now predeclared meshes, so
> parsing time has gone down and the memory footprint should be smaller.
> 
> There's still some things I want to improve - there are some big gaps at the end
> of the railings in some cases, I'd like to add some textures, and possibly a
> couple more objects (e.g. planters). If I can maintain the momentum, I'll also
> play with the environment and placement structure a bit...
> 

Terribly good indeed!

Maybe something to look into: the stair steps. Taking into consideration 
the size of the visitors to this structure, either the banisters are too 
low, or the steps are to high. I guesstimate by a factor of two maybe a 
bit more. This becomes only obvious in the close up views of course. 
 From a distance, I am afraid the steps structure would become invisible 
if reduced in height size.

-- 
Thomas

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"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Here's a few images from within the structure.

This is - ridiculously good!

I'm of course curious about the method/rules you're using to assemble all the
parts, and how many lines of code you're up to now!  ;)

Great work - after so many years of making great POV-Ray renders, you're still
knocking impressive scenes out of the park!

- BW

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"BayashiPascal" <bai### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> All the views seem to be on the 'surface' of the structure.

Yup, the interesting views all ended up being on the outside, somewhere in the
middle. Although the ones right on top are cool too!

> I don't know what
> your lighting setup is but I presume there is only one light_source outside
> the structure. Is it getting too dark as you move deeper inside it ? In that
> case, I wonder how it would look like if there was no light outside and light
> inside some of rooms instead...

Yup, a single sun, then the ambient light cast by the lit areas and the
surrounding sky. And yes, it does get quite dark in the middle, although that's
not why I didn't include any 'inner' views - I just found the edge views to be
nicer from a visual composition perspective :)

It had occurred to me to put a central sun with a darker environment, but I
haven't tried it yet. Adding lights as one of the cell building components is a
good idea, but a large number of conventional lights in a scene like this would
likely be a slow render. However, I'm using UberPOV for this, so a better
approach might be to use radiosity-only lights and crank up the count...

Bill

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"Shay" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Bill, that's looking very cool! So much work.

Thanks! Not too much work, it's quite a modular pile of code so it's easy to
tinker with it a bit at a time. I don't really have enough spare time to go at
this full tilt, so having a project that's easy to dip into is nice...

Bill

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Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> Maybe something to look into: the stair steps. Taking into consideration
> the size of the visitors to this structure, either the banisters are too
> low, or the steps are to high. I guesstimate by a factor of two maybe a
> bit more.

Yeah you're right! I'd like to address this - I'll have to tweak the post size
too because they're almost as wide as the steps. I'm a little limited, because
the stairs need to remain at 45 degrees for ease of assembly, but it should be
possible to improve the scale at least.

There's another improvement I'd like to make - if you look carefully at a
staircase edge-on, you'll notice that the steps start at floor level at the
bottom, but end below floor level at the top. This means that the staircase
doesn't currently bisect a cell, they're very slighty less than 45 degrees. If I
ever want to make longer staircases that span many cells, I'll need to change
the arrangement slightly so they tesselate diagonally.

Bill

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I'm of course curious about the method/rules you're using to assemble all the
> parts, and how many lines of code you're up to now!  ;)

It's basically a grid of cells in a 3D array. Each cell is 0 (empty), 1 (floor),
10-13 (staircase), or 20-23 (above staircase). The grid starts with a random set
of floor cells, then a subsequent pass places stair values, being careful to
avoid collisions. The final stage makes the geometry for each cell, looking at
nearest neighbours to decide what kind of rails and posts should be used. I have
a large set of very small macros to help with this - IsFloor(I,J,K),
IsCorner(I,J,K,Dir) etc - which all build on each other to make a relatively
readable pile of logic that then calls another set of macros to make the actual
geometry. I've put the geometry helpers into another file to avoid confusion, so
the main scene file is really just grid management. The two files together are
about 650 lines at present.

> Great work - after so many years of making great POV-Ray renders, you're still
> knocking impressive scenes out of the park!

I look at POV-Ray as a little 'comfort programming' environment - the
limitations of SDL allow a sort of purity to problem-solving. I'm a developer by
day, so POV-Ray allows me to indulge in small-scale projects outside work that
don't become time-sinks. And as a bonus, the output looks nice :)

Bill

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Il 27/11/2021 17:53, Bill Pragnell ha scritto:
 > Here's a few images from within the structure.
 >
 > I added a randomized camera to put the viewer on a random floor, and 
spent some
 > time detailing the various components so it stands up to closer 
scrutiny. This
 > also revealed a whole slew of placement bugs that didn't really show 
up on the
 > distant view. The rails, posts and corner posts are now predeclared 
meshes, so
 > parsing time has gone down and the memory footprint should be smaller.
 >
 > There's still some things I want to improve - there are some big gaps 
at the end
 > of the railings in some cases, I'd like to add some textures, and 
possibly a
 > couple more objects (e.g. planters). If I can maintain the momentum, 
I'll also
 > play with the environment and placement structure a bit...
 >
 > Bill
 >
 >

Wonderful!

Paolo

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