This is a town lost in the clouds, in some remote corner of Brazil.

The buildings are based on some I saw in photos of Brazil, with tiled roofs and pastel-colored window and door frames. I added a cloudscape in the background to give it a Shangri-La feeling, and I tried to add to the illusion of altitude by looking down on the buildings, similar to some commonly seen views of skyscrapers, although these are regular-sized buildings.

The buildings are CSG. The flag was made in Wings3d. I simulated the decorative ironwork on the balconies using a turbulated crackle, flipped and repeated accordingly. The bannister railings on the flag tower were made with SpilinEditor. The roof tiles are CSG, rotated and placed from within a loop.

The main research-and-development innovation in the making of this image was the cumulus clouds. They are built up using trace and eval_pigment in order to give them a suitable bumpy appearance. I also used crackle form as a texture on the clouds to make them look bumpier. I think the technique makes pretty good cumulus clouds, in terms of overall shape and color.

computer: 433 Celeron running Windows 98
Wings3d for the flag
PoseRay to convery Wing3D output to POV-Ray mesh
SpilinEditor for the bannister railings
My own software for getting the POV-Ray RGB colors from photos
IrfanView for conversion to JPEG, and measuring dimensions of objects in photos, during the research phase.

None

Nice try and but the picture hesistates between photorealism and a more painterly approach and isn't completely successful.