TITLE: Rocket Man NAME: Chris Hernandez COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: chrish@rivernet.com.au WEBPAGE: none TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: cbh_iw.jpg ZIPFILE: cbh_iw.zip RENDERER USED: POV 3.02 for Windows TOOLS USED: sPatch, Adobe Photoshop v4.0, Tree Designer, Canon Scanner RENDER TIME: 7hrs 2mins HARDWARE USED: - Pentium II 266 with 64 meg ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Commander Ace McCool, this is Earth Base One. the Zornid Brain Changers are attacking us. Our defenses are down; we need help! Only you can save us...." With his Atomic Discombobulator in hand, Ace McCool (member of the elite Universe Protection Unit) steps toward his trusty spaceship, Condor 5. With a grim sigh, he prepares for launch, and accepts his duty. Looks like he has to save the world... again. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The bulk of this image was done with CSG. The only modellers used was were sPatch for the towel and Tree Designer for the tree (duh!). The cape is made up of two layers of bezier patches. The texture of the inside layer is based on a scan of a real towel. I blended this with a POV color_map to get some consistency on the texture since I was having trouble keeping the contrast down on the scan. The normal is also based on the scan, but blended (using average) with some bozo and a turbulent x-gradient/sine wave to get some noise and wrinkles in. Unfortunately most of the detail in the texture was lost in the focal blurring and I didn't have time to tweak it. The tree was created in 2 seperate parts as well. There is one model which makes up the main body of the tree (including leaves and branches) and another for the roots. I seperated the two in order to make scaling and tweaking of each easier. All other elements (the houses, fence, treehouse, boy, etc) were created by hand using CSG. Since the modelling of the arms and gloves were very fiddly, I cheated by modelling only the left arm and rotating it 180 degrees to be used as the right one - making sure that the fingers and hand were covered up by towel. I used the same trick with the shoes - modelling them without any leftness/rightness (for lack of a better term) so that they could be used on both legs. The other 2 trees in the background are flat GIFs image_mapped onto boxes. You may not notice, but the room visible through the window is also detailed with a desk lamp and a shelf. I had wanted to add some books to the shelf but that got chopped due to time constraints. I also had to give up doing some dandilion type vegetation that I wanted to add to the grass to break up the ground a little it more. I wrote an include file for the grass. This file creates a 1x1 square covered with many randomly rotated and positioned grass blades. At first I used a bezier patch as the basic grass blade, but this ended up using too much memory. I ended using some CSG cylinders to construct the blades in the final version. Since the number of blades had to be cranked up to get a convincing patch of grass, I ended up using patches of different resolutions. The patches of grass close to camera were full resolution (3 patches of about 2600 blades each), and subsequent rows away from the camera contained lower and lower numbers of grass blades. Even so, this render ended up taking about 170 Mb of memory, so I found my system continously thrashing out to disk when rendering. I had planned the scene to be in bright daylight from the start, thinking that it would be easy to light. I found I was wrong. I had to spend a lot of time fiddling with the lighting setup and getting the balance between the key and fill lights right. I'm actually still not happy with the lighting - I think the shadows are too soft. BUT when I found it looked even funnier with sharp shadows. If only I had more time.... As usual, I was under a bit of time pressure, so my code is close to unintelligible. I will be happy to get email from anyone if they want help making sense of it.