TITLE: Return of the Tooth Beasts NAME: tor andersson COUNTRY: Sweden EMAIL: d97ta@efd.lth.se TOPIC: Nature COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition JPGFILE: daemons.jpg ZIPFILE: daemons.zip RENDERER USED: povray3 for win, povpro, povray3 for linux TOOLS USED: sPatch (what would I do without it...) hf-lab -- terrain form -- plants moray -- tower Picture Publisher 6.0 -- height field manipulation, material map drawing povwin text editor cjpeg gimp emacs patience (it took over 5 'final' renders to get the lighting the way I wanted it :( ) etc... RENDER TIME: 800x600,A0.3 p200mmx, povwin: 53 mins p200mmx, povpro: 42 mins p2-233, linux: 30 mins Peak memory used: 44579374 bytes (thats about 45 megs) GAMMA USED: Heh? I don't know! With the 'gamma.gif' image, the lines/gray are the same brightness at 2.4 when my image looks at its best. The image is supposed to look sort of pale blue tinted, but darkish. It is a little pale, so turn down brightness and up contrast 'til it's just perfect :-) The darkest parts of the water are supposed to be almost black. HARDWARE USED: P200MMX, 96Mb RAM, 4Mb Matrox Mystique gfx card, EIZO-F55 17" monitor (win95) P2-233, 64Mb RAM, 2Mb Matrox Mystique, Compaq 17" monitor (linux redhat 5.0) IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In a distant time, when civilization is long dead, only ruins remain to tell of the great history that has long since passed away to dust. As have the magical barriers holding the daemons from the realm of nature. And beasts are slipping through... The question is, will the blind Tooth Beasts survive in a world in which they have not lived in for Aeons? Will mother nature get rid of them as the misfits they are? Or is it in their nature to be unnatural? DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: idea ------ Nature... a very vague definition! Maybe a clash between artificial and organic? -- Nah. What about some kind of creature? -- Mmmhmm. Landscape -- ...bryce; nope, too boring... Run dry of good ideas... Give up hope of doing an entry this turn too... *weeks pass* weird semi lucid dream with pink demons with really HUGE teeth... *weeks pass* vague attempt to model the beasts... another few weeks pass, wondering how the beasts can eat with teeth like that... And where are the eyes? I don't remember any from my dream. *weeks pass, midsummer* I am bored, so I do some messing around in sPatch, and I come up with the tooth beasts you can see in this image. As said, the beasts are from one of my strange semi-lucid dreams, so maybe they ARE trying to break free! modeling ----------- Using sPatch is just so darned easy, I can hardly believe it! I can't imagine life without it. The tooth beasts, the bug, the trees, and the birds were all created in sPatch. I exported and textured the layers separately. The tooth beasts are just clones because sPatch models just eat memory... (Big drawback... it limits the usability of sPatch quite a bit) The flowers were created in Form for a previous image. I slightly modified the texture (added specular to make the leaves more 'waxy'). The tower is a bunch of superellipsoids (0.3,0.3) thrown together in WinMoray (shareware version with the lousy nag screen) As for composing the scene, it was all done by hand. Considering it took >10 seconds to draw the tower in moray, I wouldn't dream of composing a scene with this many primitives in any graphic modeler (over 13000 frame level objects, all in all) To my aid I used a specially designed texture: a grid. (see image in zip file: grid.jpg, grid.inc) This really speeded up the guess work of placing my objects, so I could spend more time playing around with textures and lighting rather than wasting time trying to put my objects where I WANT them... texturing ------------ Most textures are either simple plain colors with varying amounts of phong/specular, or slightly modified standard textures (T_Stone8, S_Cloud1 to name a few) The water I made myself, it's a blue tinted black with reflectivity around 0.7 and some phong on it. I think it looks pretty photo realistic. The grass texture is an image map I ripped from Sonyas Summer entry, in turn ripped from 3d Studio. It's in jpeg form in the zip file. lighting ----------- The lighting was tricky... the trees cast shadows on the tower, so I had to place a light source coming from another direction (as you can see by the highlights in the bug's eyes)... too bad. One light is shadowless and is used to brighten up the tree trunks which are mostly in shadows... too bad patches light up on both sides when doing this... I also added a slight blue-ish ground fog to give some depth cuing and a distant haze.