After the first deadline of the competition, I was not satisfied of my entry. I had worked on it for only two week, it's too short to complete a good POV-Ray scene. When the dead line was extended, I thought it was a chance to complete a high quality scene with the truck I previously modelised.

I started to modelise a trailer, the biggest I found. Like the tractor, its entirely made in CSG. The small orange lights are lit by an ambient value of 1 and an emitting media. The company logo came later. The first trailer was entirely white. When I submit a WIP on the french newsgroup, someone suggest me to put a drawing in this large and empty space. One of his idea was to put a advertissement for the sponsors then the first thing I put on the trailer was an AMD Opteron logo with a slogan but I thought it was demagogic so I changed it. I put "ZESLY LOGISTICS", then "NEXUS LOGISTICS". I took "NEXUS", which does not mean anything in particular, from the title of a metal music album. It's not an image_map, it is two text objects and a prism for the star within an objet pattern.

I put the truck and its trailer on a freeway I previously modelised for another scene and placed the camera for the final point of view. I almost never changed this camera. I used other one for working on the scene. I added street lights, some CSG, a light_source and an emitting media for each one.

At this point, I began working on the lightning of the truck and the freeway. I switched to 1 the ambient values for each lights of the truck and I put emetting medias in front of this lights.

I had no precise idea for the environment. I excluded the idea of a landscape because I don't know making good ones with POV-Ray, especialy texturing. I don't feel it.

I was hesitating between an industrial environment with rafineries or chemical plants and a city environment. I downloaded the city generator macro made be Chris Colefax and put the default city on each side of the freeway to see what happens. I was enthusiastic about the result so I kept this idea.

I changed the first freeway, which was a french freeway, and I modelised an american freeway. This one is widerand the lines are different. All texture are procedural one. Lines are made with object pattern. The grafitti is a tribute to my favorite POV-Ray SDL editor : qtpoveditor, qtpe in abbreviated form.

I was not satisfied by the transition between the freeway and the city. I did not want a wall. While searching reference pictures on the web, I discoverd The Kennedy Expressway in Chicago which is boarded by grass and trees. I modelised an embankment with an isosurface. I rendered it separatly with an orthographic camera to make an height_field map. I used this map with Francois Dispot's Height_field Compressor to cover my embankment with grass. This tool is design for saving memory while covering large and complexe landscapes with grass. I put trees, made with POV-Tree, using the trace() functions, Some trees hide defaults of the grass patch.

I modelised my own buildings, modifying Chris Colefax's macros to allow more complexe bilding's shape and have different roof for one building type. There is four building types, one has three roof types, anothoer has two roof types. The green pyramid was made by Sebastien Fache (a.k.a. LightBeam). The windows are lit by a procedural texture_map with high ambient value which cover a single object for the entire building.

There is somme grainy reflection on the truck due to the grass. I tried blur reflection with an average of normal but it takes too long to render. I also tried some workaround with no_reflexion on the grass but it destroy my lightning.

I added some detail on the truck : a sign modelised with Wings on the bonnet, some rivets and two windscreen wiper.

Render times :
first pass : 3 hours 12 minutes 17 seconds (11537 seconds)
second pass : 3 hours 45 minutes 9 seconds (13509 seconds)
first detail view : 2 hours 17 minutes 52 seconds (8272 seconds)
second detail view : 1 minutes 42 seconds (102 seconds)