TITLE: "Inside the magic hat." NAME: Stefan Maes COUNTRY: Belgium EMAIL: maes@uia.ua.ac.be (until October) WEBPAGE: http://sch-www.uia.ac.be/u/maes/ TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: smmagic.jpg RENDERER USED: Pov-Ray for Windows v3.01 TOOLS USED: - sPatch by Mike Clifton (http://users.aimnet.com/~clifton/spatch/spatch.html) - bend.inc by Chris Colefax (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/) RENDER TIME: 12-15h I guess. I had to interrupt tracing a number of times. The bunny's ears are the problem elements. Remove them from the scene and a 800x600 AA0.3 trace is ready in 15minutes... HARDWARE USED: P166 with 32Mb of RAM. Win95. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Have you ever wondered what the rabbit did while waiting for the magician to pull him/her out of the magic hat? Well, here's an idea. Tired of being dragged out of the hat by his ears (much like Roger Rabbit in the "Who framed ..."-movie Mr. Floppy decides it's time to quit this job. But since he doesn't want to end up on a table as dinner, he's looking for a new career. With his background/experience the choice was easy: magician! So he got himself a "Magic 101" toolkit for the apprentice magician. It was quite a disappointment for him, as several items seemed to be missing. What about a manual? But with the little items he got a good magician can create a lot of small, neat tricks. Anyone seen the "Stuff the white rabbit" magic shows on BBC television a few months ago...? DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I was looking around in my room for inspiration for a new subject to trace. I thought I should try and model something more 'organic', especially since I agreed to render some alien sprites for a Doom project (shameless plug for Functional Entropy and http://entropy.telefragged.com). Looking at the stuffed animals occupying the corner of my bed, the theme was decided. With the current IRTC topic in mind, I picked my bunny as a model. Should the modelling turn out well, I would turn it into a submission for the IRTC, which would have been my first after submitting twice to Matt Kruse's raytracing competition: sm_darts.jpg in December 1994 (games) and sm_xrays.jpg in June 95 (science). The bunny was modelled with blobs using no modeller at all. I just started typing code and added blob components according to my intuition. Surely this isn't the best method to work as it requires lots of test renders, but seeing a model take the (desired) shape gave me great satisfaction/pleasure. The ears are simple prisms that were bend using Chris Colefax's great BEND.INC file. Needless to say this was a big hit on render times, so in all my later test renders I omitted the ears. (Re)Modelling the ears in sPatch e.g. might have been wiser, but the .INC-way was so easy and I was running out of time while trying to make a more complete scene... Also, I was too pleased with the result to really consider redoing the ears right away. Texturing was minor problem. I regretted not having paid attention to the fur/grass discussion on either the newsgroup or the IRTC mailinglist. The textures I came up with are maybe not that realistic, but since the bunny was never modelled after a real animal, who cares? I'm very happy with the way it turned out. Friends who I showed the final bunny seemed to like it as well. One of them even said it was my best image ever... When you think of magic and rabbits, magic hats are never far away. Hence the idea or better the question "What's inside the magic hat?" came up. So I started adding pretty standard magic items: cards, balls, coins, a rope, etc. But whatever I tried I couldn't get anything pleasing/coherent together. I needed something to link all these objects. Say, what about a "Magic 101" toolkit for wanna-be magicians? Modelling was pretty easy, as well as texturing. Unlike with the box of playing cards, I used raytraced (text{} object) instead of scanned/screen-captured images. Still there was something missing, as I tended to like my simple "bunny in the high hat in the spotlight" image_map (see box cover) better than my actual submission. (a larger image should be on my webpage soon). The problem with the image I had then, was that it was so clean, so ordered. It didn't look like the bunny was experimenting with his new toys. I tried scattering around some playing cards, but that didn't work. As I was about to give up, it hit me. What else can you do with paying cards? Make houses, or better, high towers. Of course you only do that when you're bored to the extreme. So I needed to bunny to be bored as well as a reason for him to be bored. Hence I replaced the manual by a simple leaflet explaing what magic, sorcery and witchcraft are. I needed it to be a bit cracked, wrinckled, whatever and so I modelled it in sPatch starting from a simple grid. Once all objects were in place, I changed the lighting: spot lights instead of point lights and all of them less bright. But once I got the scene rerendered at 800x600 AA0.3 I didn't really like what I saw. The background, i.e. a big cylinder representing the outlines of the magic hat, tended to distact from the image. It was either too plain or too detailed. So in the end I opted for no background at all. Just plain black, as in all of my previous images. Maybe I'm just trying to hide my lack of skills, but that way my images look more like stills than incomplete... FOR THOSE WONDERING - what's written on the box: Boxcover: "Magic 101" & "By S. Maes" Sides: "Magic 101" & "Amaze your friends with 101 easy-to-learn tricks (stuffed rabbit not included) - what's written on the box of cards: "Black Jaguar" & "Playing cards" - what instructions are written on the paper: "Magic 101 Magic: (1) Art of controlling events by the pretended use of supernatural forces; Superstitious practices based on a belief in supernatural agenciues. (2) Art of obtaining mysterious results by tricks (3) Quality produced as if by magic Sorcery: (1) Witchcraft (usual word) (2) Evil acts done by sorcery Witchcraft: Use of magic" (Source: Oxford Student's Dictionary of Current English - 1980)