This image is of the new City Hall in Calgary. As you can see it is a large building with a lot of windows. The image was created using Pov-Ray 3.6. I chose City Hall because I didn’t see anybody do this in the previous years and I thought it was cool that it was really big. I thought because Pov-Ray had most of the tools available of a normal programming language that it would be good at performing iterations (it was). Creating the model was pretty straightforward:

1) Make a window – a box

2) Make a frame for the window – a few boxes

3) Make a row of windows – a loop

4) Make a slanted window - triangles

5) Make a frame for the slanted window - more triangles

6) Make a row of slanted windows – a loop

7) Make a gap in the windows – a box

8) Make a row of gaps in the windows – a loop

9) Make blocks of rows – calls to functions containing loops

10) Make a pattern of blocks – nested loops

At first glance the window pattern looks tricky, but it can be done in 2 nested loops calling other functions. The hardest part was created the slanted windows. I didn’t just want to rotate and scale a normal window because it’s not very “clean”. Instead I actually made the windows using a mesh of individual triangles. This was a pain, and I could have done it in a different way (difference 2 rotated blocks with a normal block), but at least I learned a bit about triangles. I also made the border of the slanted windows using triangles.

Another challenge was making sure the programming was modularized so I could manipulate constants to make everything look different.

Below is the picture whose angle I copied. Other pictures were necessary to figure out what the building looked like at the far end. I started making the things outside of the building, but it looked crappy so I decided not to, and put a big blue block underneath the building. All in all I was happy with the accuracy of the windows. Note that I don’t think the sign actually says Gallery of Visual Arts, it says something like Gallery “funny symbol” Visual Arts.

I took the sky from an online tutorial.