TITLE: Killing Fields NAME: Nathan O'Brien COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: no13@no13.net WEBPAGE: http://www.no13.net TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: 13hystri.jpg ZIPFILE: 13hystri.zip RENDERER USED: Povray for Windows. 3.1 TOOLS USED: Paintshop Pro, Win3d, Crossroads, Autocad. RENDER TIME: 1 day 10 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium II with 128Mb ram, Nt4 OS IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Not all events in history are great, heroic, or to be celebrated. Some are so horrific that despite the desire, they should never be forgotten. Even so, it appears that they are too readily repeated. I chose the Cambodian Killing Fields in response to this and what is currently happening in Yugoslavia. In particular I still remember images of the stacked skulls shown on television as a child. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: No technical marks for the skull and jaw bone. The model was kindly donated by Ken Tyler. As such I haven't included the mesh files in the ZIP file. The skull was in OBJ format and was coverted, manipulated and modified using Crossroads, Win3d and Autocad. Having the skull object allowed me to concentrate on several aspects of the scene in more detail than I normally have time for. Even though the scene file shows the solutions to those aspects are simple they still required several weeks of testing. Composition. Many tests were carried out with spheres in place of the skulls to get the correct spacing and camera settings. The jaw bone was also set to reinforce the perspective of the platform edge on which the skulls are sitting. I used a simple macro to jitter the position and orientation of each skull to add a little randomness towards the setout. I also wanted to image to look like a photograph. To enhance this effect I added some focal blur. Doing serveral tests with the sphere to find the best area for fucus and the number of samples required. In order to not distract from the final image I burried my 13 logo deep in the shadow of the lower left hand corner. To see it you can lighten the image with a high gamma settings. Lighting. I used an area light in conjunction with radiosity in order to make the skulls look as real as possible. The concept was that the skulls are in a jail cell in a decaying building deep in the jungle. I wanted a soft light that did not have the harsh feel of direct sunlight. The shadows from the jail bars were used to provide areas of deep shadow to balance that in the left hand corner of the scene. Texture and Colour Many test were carried out for the textures and colours. I used a very limited color pallet. In essence there are 4 base colours. Much of the texturing is done with the use of normals rather textures. The skull normal uses both a normal_map and averaged normals. The rusted metal base has painted areas using the same base colour as the skulls and the rear wall. In order to add additional texture to the rear wall I used the metal bars of the jail cell, off screan, to cast soft shadows across the wall. The early test showed that the partial skull in the top left hand corner appeared too bright and helped to unbalance the image. This was corrected by creating a special texture, identical to the normal skull texture, but with a lower diffuse setting, to reduce the intensity of the element. Detail Given the high level of detail for the skull object I required a base for the skulls of equal detail. The concept was that the base was a make shift item of metal. Based on some mesh samples from work I wrote a macro to create a mesh made from tori. Many tests later the rusted metal, with old paint areas, texture was completed. I added a few rust bubbles and lifting paint sections to the front area of the metal bench as well.