A few notes about this project

This project came about as a result of the wife ordering me to pull the webcam from my site neatocool.com. 
Since there is very little content on my web site anyway, the loss of the webcam kinda made the site suck 
even more than it did before. It also doesn't help when you site has a pretentious name to live up to like 
neatocool (I used to use this term a lot in the 70's).

So, since I live way out in the middle of nowhere, there is literally nothing I could point the webcam at 
from my house that would look any different than a static jpeg (and where's the fun in that), I decided 
that I would just have to make some content up to use as a "virtual webcam" on the site. It was also at 
this time I ran across Sean Kenney's Greenwich Village project here on Brickshelf.com.

The long term goal of the project is to have a computer generated scene that is continously updated and 
rendered about every 10 minutes or so (currently I'm using POV to do the rendering). The minifigs will 
get to go to work in the morning and return home at night, traffic along the street will flow based on 
the time of day, buses will pick people up at the bus stop, and lights will come on and go out as they 
would based on the time of day. It's a bit ambitious, but workable. Right now, I'm still in the 
experimentation (with POV) and model building phase, and expect to have an early prototype ready sometime 
in early 2005. Source code and details to be made available to anyone interested afterwards (no point in 
keeping this all to myself - I want to see what more creative people can do).

As of 08-28-04 I'm still working on getting the lighting correct in POV. The cars and minifigs you see 
in the posted pictures before this date are all "placeholders" until I get more models done (no time to 
work on this lately). Everything you see is 100% POV and MLCad with a few extra custom parts. The lights 
in the night scenes are actually light-emitting bricks that I'm managed to create by adding some POV code 
to a few customized DAT files and then using them as I normally would in MLCad (nice and simple). The end 
result is great when you have just a few of these bricks, but if you have 50 of these in a scene, your 
render time (and memory usage) goes way up! I'll need to optimize this later, but for now I'm just seeing 
what works and what doesn't.

Stay tuned for more updates.


Rick
www.neatocool.com
r_sarvas@hotmail.com

Note: the neatocool.com web site is somewhat unreliable because I'm self-hosting. Try again another day if 
you are unable to get the site to come up.