I remember of your work and even wondered sometime if you were still working on
it cause I really liked it. Well, now I know you do and I like it even more! :-)
The buildings seems tightly packed. Simply "forgetting" to place some of them
would help breaking the monotony too, as there would be spaces for parking lot,
park, place, etc... in a real city.
Looking forward the next improvement :-)



"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I've been re-working my old "city buildings" scene from... several years ago(!)
> It has not changed much since then, except for some subtle but important
> additions and corrections to the code.
>
> There are 650 buildings in this shot, randomly using 34 'real' image_maps for
> the building windows (so far!) Those original images have from 1 to 20 or so
> windows in them-- precisely cropped, so that the code eventually uses '1 window
> unit' as a basic size to apply to each building. (But the entire window-image
> tile is used if need be, not just a single window from it.) I also had to
> manually make 34 window 'hold-out mattes' in Photoshop to create  the window
> reflections, applied by a complex  texture{image_pattern....} used as a mask.
> (See the docs about this.)
>
> The real 'workhorse' code for texturing each building is POV-ray's BOXED
> pattern-- and just yesterday, I discovered that I had been misusing it all this
> time (for my purposes); I had to re-work a major portion of the code to correct
> that flaw. Now each building's size is at strict multiples of the '1-unit
> window' size-- along with the random thickness of the added 'concrete edges'.
> Btw, the 'concrete' color is an average of each actual window tile-- chosen from
> 25 random points in each image_map, using eval_pigment(...) in a macro. Plus
> some subtle added 'dirt'.
>
> I've also added some more rooftop 'greebles', as well as exterior vertical box
> shapes to the outsides of some buildings-- to break up the monotony. (I plan to
> experiment some more with that idea.) Now I need to add 'upper stories' to some
> of the buildings-- like recessed smaller copies of the main ones. That's how
> most tall buildings in New York City are built-- in the past, they had to be
> 'stepped back', by city ordinance, the taller they got.
>
> Then, some sidewalk trees-- and maybe animated cars in the streets. And
> first-floor lobbies/doors, which will be a major task!
>
> The scene so far parses 'reasonably' quickly: For 650 buildings, with AA but no
> radiosity yet--  78 seconds total render time on my old Windows 7 machine (at
> 1600 X 900). The 'peak memory used' is about 1.1MB.
>
> Still a work-in-progress, but comments, suggestions and nit-pics welcome ;-)

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