TITLE: The Art of Letter Writing
NAME: Teddy Nishiyama
COUNTRY: JAPAN
EMAIL: tnishi@ari.ncl.omron.co.jp
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: letter.jpg
ZIPFILE: letter.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.0 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray TTF2UDO

RENDER TIME: 
    about 6 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    P5-166

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

"The Art of Letter Writing":  Sometimes, saying the simplist things can 
be the most difficult to express.  This image tries to convey that idea 
with all the mistakes on the paper, as well as the crumpled up paper at 
the top, when all the writer wanted to say was "Happy Birthday"...
Hmmm, just couldn't find the right words?
As a coincidence(?), my mothers' birthday was this month (October), but 
being too busy with work, I haven't had a chance to say happy birthday 
yet....maybe she'll see this on the net?


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Actually, I had pretty much given up entering this round because,
(1) I couldn't come up with a good idea. 
(2) one idea that I DID come up with was too difficult for me technically. 
(3) I was too busy preparing for several presentations as well as a 
    technical fair at work.
Anyway, enough for the excuses.  The handwriting is something I just 
scribbled and scanned in and placed on a thinned out "cube" (paper) as a 
texture map. The crumpled paper I really had problems with, and considering 
the extreme time constraints of starting this model two nights before 
deadline, I had to take the first and only method that came to mind.  
That was to take a bezier patch(sheet) and pull and fold and twist the 
thing until it kind of looked crumpled.  To add to the effect, I added 
a wrinkled texture map...but it still didn't quite turn out very well...
please ignore it.

Aside from the paper, I would say that about 900f the objects are done 
with rotational sweeps.  The glass, the water in the glass, the bottles, 
the ink in the bottles, the caps, and most of the pen.

The writing on the pen and the "Happy Birthday" calligraphy writing on the 
paper is my first attempt at using TTF2UDO that came with Moray.  I messed 
up with the "Happy" it seems because it was supposed to be red. When I 
transfered the files to another machine to raytrace, I forgot a couple of 
files which happened to be in another directory,and I had to recreate the 
ini files and I must not have done it correctly....but unfortunately, there's 
no time to redo it.

I wanted to add a slight focal blur to it, but again, no time.

some more mistakes...the red bottle of ink for some reason didn't come out 
right.*sigh* no time to find the mistake and redo it...actually, it's 
rendering right now as I write this and I'm afraid to see how the blue 
bottle of ink is going to turn out.

Oh well, I think there's more meaning in my participating than just giving 
up not trying, right?  :)