Introduction
I chose to model the hotel using pov-ray, I could tell from previous offerings of the course that lots of people started out using pov-ray but would change to a different software suite after awhile. Therefore I was expecting it to be hard so I left lots of extra time. The idea of creating a picture from words seemed too good of a challenge to pass up. I used the regular pov-ray studio for windows. The text editor built into the IDE used with windows was awful. I would have much rather done it in linux, but when I started the project the linux desktop I had was much slower then the windows machine. To render on windows on low quality was seconds, and on the linux machine minutes. I still found myself using the wonder that is emacs to clean up text files, or to help me debug missing brakets.
Good Stuff
The prince of wales hotel is quite a sight, and I was intimidated to get started. One thing I quickly found out, was that even though the hotel had an incredible amount of detail, there was lots of straight lines. Pov-ray, and my inexperience combined we could handle straight lines. I'm not sure what would have happend if there was a lot of curved surfaces that needed drawing, most likely a change of software. Also tutorials and code snippets for pov-ray are endless, I'm sure its no different for any other graphics software, but I found most of the texts and help files for pov-ray to be informative, accurate and concise(short).
Problems
I still can't translate properly, pov-ray has a couple different ways to translate,
and for some reason I just could not grasp the simplest form of it, everytime I used
it some sort of awful pov-ray earthquake would come through and throw chunks of the
hotel all over waterton, catastrophe.
Detail, its my own fault for picking such an intricate thing, but even though I think the final project looks pretty alright there is so much detail missing, and really detracts from the overall image.
Textures/Lights
I used a lot of prebuilt stuff here. For example clouds, fog, planes, and light
sources came from help files or the internet. I think the difference between texture
light and the rest of the stuff, is that you really need to know whats going on here.
With the other stuff I could fumble my way through trial and error. But here the
desired effect is so subtle, and there is so much variablity you can't just change
random numbers and hope for the best. And with the nature of texture and lighting
its left till the end, and time runs out.
Conclusion
What do you mean I have to think? As the scene progresed further and further and perhaps my experience rose, I frequently found myself thinking. If I were to just think about what I was trying to do, I could get it done a lot faster, and more precisely. I think this experience representing images as words in code will be very benefitial to the remainder of the course.
I'm fairly happy with my final product, I wish I could have spent more time on detail, texture and lighting. I also wish I could have had a more scenic backdrop. Given that the project was done in POV-ray it is quite pretty. I've learned a lot, and hopefully will find the time to continue tinkering with pov-ray. Here is a couple links, the first one is shot from up high, the second is a shot dead one the light is bad so I didn't want to show it on the page.
Source for files can be found here