TITLE: A&E
NAME: Steven Kazemir
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: kazemir@pde.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.pde.com/~kazemir
TOPIC: Arts and Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: axe.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-RAY 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhino NURBS Modeller, Paint Shop Pro,

RENDER TIME: 
    ~68 Hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    200MHz Pentium MMX, 64M Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I have been waiting for a IRTC topic to inspire me, the Arts and
Entertainment topic did so right away.  Upon reading the topic I
had an image idea in my mind almost imediately.  The final image
not exactly the same as my original idea, but it is quite close.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Upon starting this rendering, I knew that modelling popcorn and
the masks would be tough, but I was up to the challange.  It
turns out that the masks were quite easy (Thanks to the 3DCafe for
the "Happy Face"), but the popcorn and the film were quite difficult.

By the way, I have not included a ZIP file, because the entire source
for this image adds up to about 20Megs.  I am quite willing to share
any or all of the objects in my scene.  If you are interested please
e-mail me at kazemir@pde.com.

MASKS,

The masks were the first component I added.  I got the original
"Happy Face" from the 3DCafe site (http://www.3dcafe.com).  I imported
the 3DS file into the Rhino Nurbs Modeller (I recommend this modeller
_extremely_ high to anyone looking for such a beast, http://www.Rhino.Com).

Inside Rhino, I tweaked, split the lips form the face (to get two colours),
smoothed etc.  Then I exported the result as a mesh to be rendered in Rhino.

If you haven't guessed already, the Sad face is a tweak of the Happy Face.
I of course stretched/dragged mesh points down for the mouth, rotated the
eyes and eye brows into more of an upturned position.

I originally had white ribbins comming from the back of the masks, but I
never got them to look quite right, and I ran out of time, so I removed them
for this version.

POPCORN

The container for the popcorn was completely done in POV-RAY, "trial and
error".  The container was in the scene early on.  The popcorn however, was
the last thing to be added in.  This was mainly due to the fact that I kept
trying different ideas/methods of creating the popcorn.  I of course had
to do a lot of "popcorn research" to analyse exactly what popcorn looked
like (next time you eat popcorn, take a good look at it, very complicated
to describe in CSG).

After 6-7 tries, I finally came up with a method that created something that
I thought looked like popcorn (at least at the scale in my scene).  If you
get a close up look at one of my kernels, it still looks a little CSG-ish.
This popcorn method consisted of unioning several slightly offset spheres,
cutting the result with some boxes (to create crevases etc.), unionin this
result with some other unioned spheres subracted from yet another group of
spheres.  The subtracted group has the "hard" popcorn texture, this gives the
underside of the popcorn that darker look.

SPOTLIGHTS,

Fairly straight forward.  I originally modelled the entire spotlights in
Rhino.  I exported the complicated bits (the main light) and used POV-RAY
CSG to remodel the rest.  I found that Rhino meshes of long narrow tubes
create HUGE files ( >15Meg! ).  Whereas the same tube in POV-RAY was ~5 lines
of code.

The lenses are meshes from Rhino as well, with a transparent wood texture
applied to get the fresnel effect.  There is a light source behind each lens,
of course, to generate the red and blue coloured light in the scene.  Due
to the position of the light source (White light BTW), the lamp heads show
some white light creeping through the gratings, just like they would in real
life.

MUSIC BOOK

Once again I used Rhino to create two curved pages.  To get multiple pages
I simply copied the original two pages, and scaled them down in the Y-
direction (to flatten the pages), and scaled them out in the X-direction (to
fan out the edges).  Scanned in two pages of music, and that was that.

PIANO KEYBOARD

I must give thanks to Benjamin Chambers for the head start on the piano
keyboard.  His timing couldn't have been better.  I was about to start
creating a keyboard when he sent his e-mail message to the IRTC mailing
list.  With his permission, I used his file as a starting point.  The
final version is quite different, but getting a file with the basic
measurements saved me a lot of time.

The actual construction of the keyboard is fairly straight forward.  I used
iso-surface rounded boxes for all the pieces to give it the "realistic"
rounded edges.

FILM REEL

I went through a couple of versions of the film reel before I was happy
with it.  The final version was completely modeled in Rhino to get the
shapes right.  And then I exported the middle hub of the reel, and the
surface details.  The main part of the reel (two sides, with holes, rounded
edges etc) were redone in POV-RAY CSG to speed things up.  I tried exporting
the entire film reel, I got a 15Meg mesh.  Too big!

FILM STRIP

This was technically the toughest part of the scene.  I must have tried at
least 7 ways of implementing the film strip.  In the end I had to cut the
strip into pieces, and approximate it with arc's of film.  I then cut the
image map into small pieces and used planar mapping onto the arc'd pieces.
It was very math intensive (a lot of trig/scaling/offsetting etc.)  I ended
up using Rhino for the initial shape, imported the result into ACAD so I
could dimension/measure my arc pieces, and then finally enter it into POVRAY
using CSG.

The image map for the filmstrip was created using POVRAY.  I created a really
long narrow image, with ~25 frames on it.  I needed three versions, one for
the flowing strip, one for around the outer loop of the film reel, and there
is actually one more layer under this (because the film frames are translucent,
you can see the second layer).  This second layer is not all that apparent,
but if you look very closely you can see it.  Sometimes I get carried away
with details.

The holes in the filmstrip are subtracted by the way, they are not just a
transparent colour in the image map.  If I used the transparent colour, from
my anti-aliased POV-RAY image map, I got funny grey dots around the edges of
the hole (due to the anti-aliasing).  It is these many holes that account a
lot for the slow rendering time.

In hindsight, I could have made the holes a dark colour instead of white in
my image map.  This would have helped with the anti-aliased grey bits on the
edges of the holes.  Too late now!


Thanks for taking the time to read this file, and I hope you like my image!

Steve