TITLE: To Read In Bed NAME: Tony Ewen COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: Ewen.Tony@cabs.com.au TOPIC: Night COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: aenight.jpg ZIPFILE: aenight.zip RENDERER USED: TrueSpace 2 TOOLS USED: Image - TrueSpace, AutoCad LT, Corel PhotoPaint 5 (JPG conversion); Additional tool for textures - Pov-Ray, Microsoft Image Composer, Paintbrush RENDER TIME: 3 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium 100 notebook IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A scene of a bedroom lit only by a reading lamp, all set up for reading in bed. I've got a book, I've got a cuppa, and, most important of all, I've got chocolate!!! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I started out with the intention of using TrueSpace as a reference modeller, before doing the "real" image in Pov-Ray. As things progressed I realised that the textures I had in TrueSpace we're already what I wanted so, rather than reinvent the wheel, I changed plans somewhat. The modelling was fairly straightforward, due to TS2's excellent modelling interface. The lamp is modified from one supplied as a sample with TS2, I changed the textures and the shape of the shade to suit the style I was after. The lights and shadows were done by modelling the fittings and putting highly refractive bulbs in them. The shadows were all wrong without the fittings. I've used imported images as textures on the door, the picture, and the book cover. These images were the really interesting bits to produce (particularly the book cover). The image map for the door I found on my hard disk and believe it shipped with TS2. Those with spectacularly good memories (and an IRTC obsession) may just remember seing the picture on the wall before - it's my December 97 entry composed entirely within Pov-Ray. This would mean that if one included this image map in the overall rendering time, we jump from just over 1 day to just over 4 1/2 (phew, glad it wasn't all at once). The book cover was an interesting project, it is one of my many custom backgrounds that I've done this year for my own use. What it is is a celtic weave done in 3d in a kind of mat fashion. This is shown floating in the air with colored visible spotlights splashing on it. I did the initial weaving in AutoCad LT, then tossed it into PhotoPaint (which very conveniently reads WMF files) for coloring and conversion to a height field, then I tossed the resulting bitmap into a custom Pov-Ray script I've got set up for the purpose to spit out the base image. Then It was back to PhotoPaint for format conversion. When I started working on the book for this image, I grabbed the cover image and tossed it into Image Composer to add the title (created in PaintBrush). This was easier than doing the title separately within TS2. The original cover image took about an hour to render. Of course, the title was just made up on the spur of the moment. The book cover inside the bedside unit is hidden by shadow but happens to be the same as the one on the bookmark and is based on Star Trek. The image includes a model of the Enterprise E (being one of the few downloaded models I have in my collection. I did this map months ago as yet another background image. The parts of the picture frame are based on an extruded DXF file that I created in AutoCad (it's 2d control is far better than TS2, IMHO). A little axis manipulation and some trimming and, voila - one picture frame. The chocolate and wrapper were originally modelled in a separate file so as to save visual clutter while I was doing it. That was done in the train on the way to work.