Adventures in PovRay - Part 2 - Walkthrough

Step 1: Build the gallery

First I added the walls of the gallery, using a single temporary ambient light source.

Step 2: Lights and texture

I removed the temporary ambient light, and replaced it with a series of spotlights, similar to what you might find in a typical gallery. I also added a wooden floor to the gallery. Placing the spotlights, and adjusting their angle and intensity was probably the most time consuming aspect of the whole project.

Step 3: Design the figures

The terracotta figures are very simple, just one blob on top of another, with cut-outs for eyes:

To ensure the finished model looked as "realistic" as possible, it was important to make every figure individual; I therefore randomised each figure's size and colour.

Step 4: Populate the gallery

To fill the gallery with thousands of unique terracotta figures, each in a random position, I fell back upon my strongest skills: programming. I'm aware that PovRay script can handle basic language structures, but it was quicker and easier for me to write a C# program which generated each figure and its placement, and spat out the resulting PovRay code. The resulting model took a LONG time to render, but I'm pleased with the result:

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