TITLE: A Friend For Dinner NAME: Adrian White (Taff) COUNTRY: Wales EMAIL: Adrian.R.White@usa.net WEBPAGE: None as yet TOPIC: Horror COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: dinner.jpg RENDERER USED: RayDream Studio 5 - Ray Tracer TOOLS USED: Fractal Design's RayDream Studio 5, Corel's PhotoPaint 7.467, HP's IntelliScan RENDER TIME: 30 mins HARDWARE USED: Initially Pentium II 133MHz, 64MB RAM, then Pentium III 550MHz, 256MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Although my first thoughts were of the all too popular teen-scream images with copious Kensington-Gore, I've never been an avid fan of such things. Preferring horror writers such as Poe and M.R.James, and films by Hitchcock, I decided on something subtler, something in which the suspense could build, in this case in the mind of the viewer. There is nothing immediately horrific about the scene. Approaching the table, you see a single place setting, dimly candlelit. A good Chianti, a few fave beans left behind from shelling. You notice the somewhat pedestrian sticky label attached to the bottle. Distorted through the glass, you read "Gone to butcher". If you've read the book or seen the film, you'll have probably worked out this could be a final scene from "Silence Of The Lambs". You can imagine what this is all about and what we imagine is often far worse than reality, as we put our fears into the image. Of course if you don't know Silence Of The Lambs, this will take some extra explanation. The diner is a man called Hannibal Lector, who enjoys liver with a few fave beans and a good Chianti. However, since he is a psychotic killer, the liver will be human. Knowing this, the little note takes on new significance. It did seem a little odd, didn't it? "Gone to butcher". And for whom did he leave the note? Clarice, his pet FBI agent? I suppose the final premise for the picture is the horror of the unseen, the unknown and the imagined, linked to the fear (particularly for Europeans these days) that you never really know what you're eating. Just what exactly is in that meat pie? As I said, first I thought of slasher movies, through Sweeny Todd and finally, a good Chianti. Other things about the picture * Chianti is no longer bottled in those quaint, raffia clad, would-be candlesticks. The old-style Chianti bottle with candle (which you can't see) adds a splash of humour to the picture; all good horror needs some humour. How long has Hannibal been a cannibal? * The label is positioned behind the glass in an attempt to distort the words, especially butcher, as I wanted to highlight the perversion in their meaning. * The scene shows a single place setting (well it would) and lots of empty space, in keeping with the solitude and emptiness of Hannibal's life. Note: Fave beans = broad beans, much loved by the people of the Chianti producing region. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This time I stuck to one piece of software, RayDream for all modelling and rendering. The bottles and glass were drawn in the free form modeller. The beans were drawn in the mesh modeller by deforming a sphere. The raffia basket is an enlarged copy of the old Chianti bottle cut into a segment then replicated. The textures for glass are transparent green and white, with a scan of a piece of recycled card used as a texture map in the bump field. You may have guessed that the other textures for bottle labels, bottle cap, sticky label, tablemat, napkin and table surface use scans of pieces of the original items mapped onto the surface of the objects - is this cheating? It does save a lot of time. Unfortunately I just couldn't get the words on the sticky label to distort quite as much as I wanted and remain legible but I didn't want to write the word distorted so... Use of original material also gave rise to the really great knot to the left on the table. I liked it, so I left it in. The scans are used in both the colour fields and bump fields. In fact until I added a grey-scale copy of the scan to the bump field for the tabletop, the image showed some odd banding artefacts. There are only two light sources in the image. A bulb light for the candle and a dim spotlight off to the left to give some character to the bottles. Oh, and low ambient lighting. I considered adding a third light to add some reflections to the cutlery decided against it in the end. Photo-Paint was used to convert the image to JPEG and crop it to an acceptable file size