TITLE: Robot
NAME: Jim Knepley
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jknepley@nyx.net
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bots.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio 5

TOOLS USED: 
    sPatch, Poser 2, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    7 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6/233, 64 Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Robots amaze me.  That we are able to create a machine with the dexterity,
durability, and strength far in excess of our own is a technological marvel. 
As real robots vary greatly in form, I decided to choose an archetype.  Tom
Servo of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame fits the bill nicely and is way more
hip than Robbie the robot.  Daleks (the Dr. Who salt-shaker looking things) ran
a close second.

Besides, Tom was made from those special parts that control where the movie
begins and ends.  That Joel guy, he must be a great engineer.  :-)

Here we see Tom getting ready for the next host segment while Mike and Crow
still sit and watch that cinematic suppository "The Mole People."



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The model of Tom bears even close scrutiny, and looks dynamite in pretty much
any scene.  It was modeled from two photos of the actual puppet, I took a
little liberty to make it look "right."  Most of him is made up of free-form
models and primitives, except:
        His "shoulders" (actually heads from flashlights) : done in sPatch.
        His hands : Exported a Poser 2 model of a child, removed it's hands.
The barely visible seam in the transparent portion of his head is a bump map.
The barrel texture of his body (again, not very visible in this scene) is a 0x10
checkerboard with two alternating wood textures applied to the bump channel. 
Gotta_ love procedural shading.

The background is a picture of the SOL set taken while on tour of the Best
Brains facility.  I found the image on the web, but it was so small that it
took a lot of work to make it look as good as it does.  The texture on the
stand that Tom is on was ripped from the same image and perspective corrected. 
The original had a monitor obscuring part of the stand, but Photoshop took care
of that...

The image on the TV screen is from the MST3K web site.  Tom's silhouette was
removed with Photoshop.

To answer the question that I've been asked a hundred times already, yes, I'm
working on Crow.  He isn't good enough to put in a contest scene, though.  I
don_t have any plans to do Gypsy or Cambot.

If you want more information send me an e-mail.