This was somehow the scene things started with. I tried an antique building idea yet without specific plans to use it for the IRTC. The building is made of segments positioned with while loops.

Added the tube and support, also made of CSG segments, Changed the buildings a bit and added back walls. Also tried radiosity and an area_light in realistic size. The light color and intensity is roughly based on the code suggested by Kari Kivisalo in the Povray newsgroups.

Also made first version of the water reservoir.

Some work on the stone textures, the normal slows down rendering with radiosity a lot. Then I modelled the insects, their textures were changed later. The following pictures show them with their final texturing.

Also tested a first version of a rust texture for the tube/reservoir.

The bug on the right was made with blobs and some cylinders and spheres. Texturing uses displace warps.

The one on the left is made with Biowin

Finally the butterfly in the middle. The wings are based on a photograph that was converted into b/w, vectorized and converted into a Povray prism object. The body is a blob object.

Texturing was made with displace warps again.

After that i moved the viewpoint and changes the configuration of the buildings to get the main objects out of the shadow again. The aspect ratio was changed to 16:9.

Furthermore i added the doors in the walls and changed the end of the water tube. The tiles on the floor are positioned with a recursive macro and hierarchical bounding to speed up rendering.

For the tiles themselves i used heightfields. The files were made with Povray using megapov's 'depth' post processing function on an isosurface. This technique is much faster than using isosurfaces directly.

Next was the pot with the grass, the pot is a CSG object, the grass was made with Gilles Tran's makegrass macros. The doors were made darker by extending the part of the building behind, some minor changes of tube, tiles, textures.

Also added a heightfield for the far background.

Finally replaced the water reservoir and made some other minor modifications - that's it.

Some stats from the final render:

Resolution 1024 x 576 +aa0.3
Render time: 54h, 55min
Peak memory used: 263260498 bytes