After The Storm

The town hall roof glistened in the late morning sun that was blazing down on the market square, and the old ones turned to seek shelter and rest on the benches under the old tree; and though the air was still fresh and the place teeming like an ants' nest, at the heart of all the buzz there was a certain kind of serenity.

Yet the soldiers were uneasy. They knew that all was not well; after all, that's why they were here. And rumors were spreading. They looked at their armored vehicle, but even the sight of the heavy weapon on its back did not comfort them. They felt that something was in the air. Yet little did they know how right they were...

Bricks are genuine hand-crafted CSG objects; cracked glass is macro-generated CSG. Shells and skull are meshes from the 'net, modified (and converted to POV-Ray format) using Wings3D and exported from there; the scorpion is another mesh, imported via PoseRay.

The macro-generated grass (partially based on code by Jaime Vives Piqueres) uses some tricksery to get it somewhat translucent (would have loved to use POV-Ray 3.2's new SSLT, but alas! it doesn't work with radiosity yet). The ants (meshes from the 'net, imported via PoseRay) were randomly scattered around in the scene.

Quite some work went into the sand; for the overall shape, I coded some kind of proximity detection macro to generate (via DF3 auto-generation) a height field matching the "static" objects in the scene. The basic sand texture was easily done using simple small-scale bumps; getting those sand-grains glistening in the sun (an idea inspired by a noise effect of a MCPov attempt at the scene) took some more work again; I tried various approaches, until I ended up scattering 500,000 spheres across the scene, giving them varying color, reflectivity and transparency using a high-frequency texture map. The job was topped off with the footprint, which I modelled as a displacement map in Photoshop, based on the sole an actual US army approved desert combat boot.