TITLE: Caught in the Act! NAME: Michael Hough COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: AmaltheaJ5@aol.com WEBPAGE: http://members.aol.com/amaltheaj5 TOPIC: Night COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: rocky.jpg RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio 5 TOOLS USED: Ray Dream Studio, Paint Shop Pro, POV-Ray for Windows RENDER TIME: 8 hours 48 minutes HARDWARE USED: PentiumII 300mhz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: So, this is the thing that goes bump in the night! Hearing a loud commotion, I grab the flashlight and venture out to the curb to see what is there. To my dismay, I find that a raccoon has managed to knock over the trashcan, drag out all the contents, and lay them out in the street to browse at his leisure. I don't know why the little rascal looks so suprised that I caught him, especially after causing all that racket. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I had toyed with the idea of making some kind of nocturnal animal until I settled upon a raccoon. I couldn't think of a more colorful character! I soon had the whole scene planned out, so putting together the scene was just a matter of making all the parts. I started out by creating a trashcan in Rhino. I had planned on rendering the scene in BMRT, but I soon realized that I had too much planned and not enough experience with the program. Although I did get a good looking trash can using a displacement map, I ended up abandoning BMRT and settled on Ray Dream Studio since I hadn't used it in awhile and I like some of the features of the program. I was able to quickly create the trashcan and lid using the free form modeler. The handles for the can and lid were created as separate objects and then grouped with them. The hardest part was creating the bump map for the side of the cans. I create many smooth bands using a gradient on a plane in POV-Ray, smoothing the transitions so as to get a rounded appearance when the bumps were applied. I then brought the image into Paint Shop Pro and added white bands on the top and bottom and rounded off the corners using the air brush tool. A few test renders and adjustments to the map and that was done. I created the raccoon in parts, again with the free form modeler. I created cross-sections for every point on the sweep path and then adjusted the shape of the cross section to define the area of the nose, the eyes, and the muzzle. Then I created an ear as another free form, duplicated it with symmetry, and grouped them along with two spheres for the eyes with the head. I painted the head and the ears by jumping into the minimum modeler and using the 3D-paint brush. The textures I used with the paintbrush were created by combining images of raccoon fur and adjusting the highlights so they were faint and diffused. The images were touched up in Paint Shop Pro so that they moved in the right direction and covered the image evenly. The nose is a shiny leathery texture created using the cellular pattern in the bump channel. The hands and feet are made up of 6 parts: 4 toes (can't see the thumb with the camera angle), the hand and the upper and lower parts of the leg which are one free form object. It took quite a bit of time to get everything proportioned right so they attached to the body properly. The tail is another free form that I used the bend and twist deformer on. This made it easy to apply the texture, since the UV mapping followed the tail as it bent. The tail is hard to see in this image, but I did spend some time getting it to look shaggy in the image map. The fun part came after creating a streetlight (that didn't make it into the final cut). The garbage! To anyone that hasn't made trash in 3D, I highly recommend it. The trash bag was made by create a box-like form and then really messing it up. I made it so that it was almost completely bulged, with the top stretched top to bottom like it would be if things were falling out of it. The texture is a combination of a scan of a real paper bag combined with a dirty texture in a cellular global mix to get that 'ewwww gross' look. The cereal box started as a box as well, which I 'crushed' by altering the points in the side profile. The cans are made of three parts. The middle is a simple hollow cylinder freeform, the top is a slightly stretched torus freeform and the bottom is a freeform disc with a few rings extruded out of it. The textures for the cereal and can are similar to the bag, a scan for the color with some 'dirt' procedural thrown in. Almost forgot the egg carton. Probably one of the most time consuming to create, it is made from a single cross-section that is replaced by the 12 sections for the egg holders near the end of the sweep path. The flatter looking papers are freeform objects with bend and twist deformer and some text added in Paint Shop Pro. The crinkled looking ones, as are the plastic bags, are mesh forms. This is the only time I used meshes and the only reason I did was because I needed something with sharper edges and lots of folded edges. They started as a flat mesh and I grabbed points and twisted and folded them all around. Didn't I say trash was fun? Once I had all the parts I needed, I saved them as objects in the browser window and created a new scene. The street is a plane with a tiled noise pattern in the bump channel. The curb, sidewalk, and grassy area were then made in the free form modeler and placed on top of this plane. The grass uses a grassy texture I made in Paint Shop Pro and spots in the bump channel. The curb and sidewalk use a mix of the light color with just a tad of a darker color to give it a more worn look. Then all the objects I created before were added to the scene and arranged. I played with different camera angles and different lighting schemes. I had 6 lights at one time simulating streetlights, but decided to go with the one spotlight to get the 'flashlight' look to match my story. I might post one of the other renders I did on my web page later on, since it does give a totally different feel to the scene. For the scene setting, I rendered at 800x600 with the highest sampling rate and the ray trace renderer, since I find the adaptive to be inaccurate much of the time. I also used light through transparency, soft drt shadows, and a light cone. The effect of the light cone was subtle, but I figured I'd throw it in since I had time left. Ambient light was set to 5%, which is about the same as .05 in POV. The render time I gave is based on the estimate that Ray Dream gives. Not sure about the actual time, since I continued using the computer as it was rendering. I must say that the time couldn't have been much more than the estimate, and perhaps it was less. The program is very kind when it comes to CPU time. Sorry I was so long winded, but since I already wrote all that I might as well keep it. Hopefully it will make up somewhat for not including the source (It's over 40MB). If you would like to know anything more about what I did to create this scene, or just what makes me tick, just drop me a note at my e-mail address:) -Mike P.S. There was a lot of discussion about gamma on the mailing list recently. This image uses a gamma of about 1, but I noticed that if I turned it down a bit, it actually improved the feel of the image slightly, so those with higher gamma monitors would probably see the image in a good light, provided it doesn't look TOO dark.