With a little bit of fog thrown in-- smog, or city pollution.

Currently, I'm using 16 different window photo-facades, randomly placed on 450
buildings--each with reflective windows, by way of 'hold-out' mattes and using
POV-ray's image_pattern feature. (Increasing the number of buildings is trivial;
but I need to use more photos, as there is already too much window repetition.)
But I usually make a new photo tile every night!

I've managed to fix four items on my to-do list:

* making sure the windows go all the way to the edges and tops, without being
randomly chopped off. (I also reworked the window photo images to be more
accurate 'tiles'-- a learning experience.) The building widths and heights are
now based on small strict subdivisions of the (larger) tiles-- while still using
the FULL tile textures on the building. That was a happy accident ;-)

* matching the colors of the 'concrete' edges and tops of the buildings to the
average color of the photo facades; looks better than plain gray. The architects
were being creative ;-)

* putting the buildings in a street-grid layout (more or less), so that they no
longer overlap (well, I haven't *seen* any overlaps yet.) This needs more work--
as well as to make the streets go in two 90-degree directions, instead of just
one.

* adding a bit of dirt and aging to the building faces. (The 'dirt' is just an
overlay of several distorted bumps pigments.) Currently, this is also applied
over the window areas as well, which I want to eliminate.

Three things I haven't done yet: cleaning up my code(!); trying out POV-Ray's
new(?) CUBIC pattern for texturing the buildings; and re-working my code to use
heightfields for the building faces, instead of plain boxes. I hope I can do
--that-- without a major re-write!

Comments and criticisms welcome.

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'city buildings wip 2a.png' (3359 KB)

Preview of image 'city buildings wip 2a.png'