EMAIL: d@daves-house.net NAME: Dave S. Idemoto TOPIC: CONTRAST COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Left out COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: www.daves-house.net RENDERER USED: 3ds Max TOOLS USED: 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop RENDER TIME: 11hrs 54min HARDWARE USED: Dual PII Xeon 400Mhz(512k) 512MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Chistmas Eve, the parents and child all snug in their beds, the cat sleeping atop one of their heads, when young Fido all cold and alone, decided to start a fire and a feast of his own... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: For obvious reasons, I'm not pursuing a career as a poet or a writer. ;) ** Disclaimer ********** I'm not that much of an artist (and certainly not great with editing grammar), either, so many of my methods are probably the long way around for doing things. I subscribe to the Eddy Van Halen school of art. So please bear with me. :) ****** End Disclaimer ** The concept for the work was inspired one morning when I looked out of the window of my toasty bedroom at a blizzard which awaited me outside. At that moment, nothing said contrast to me more. I went through a number of different conceptual drafts, all with a window playing some central role in developing the contrast within the scene. One of the earlier concepts I had was to show the view of some pots boiling over with a warm stew on the stove, with a window on the far side of the stove and a blizzard outside. It certainly had a great deal of the contrast I was looking to create, but it just didn't inspire me. After a number of drafts later, I came up with this scene. I'll leave the interpretation up to you though. I created most all of the textures for the scene in photoshop, except for the wall paper, wrapping paper, and couch fabric, which I found at: http://www.matmap.com Thanks go to Emmanuel Corréia for providing this extensive library of royalty-free textures. For the textures that I created myself, some were scans that I've done, but most were just gradients, noise, and clouds that I could tailor to my exact needs. I used the noise maps for just about everything, to add dust and/or surface irregularities. I used the gradients for the reflection, opacity and fog maps for the window material. Oh, and I can't forget the letter to Santa! The wood materials, like the floor and table, are scanned materials, edited in photoshop. The glass was not only the bridge in this work, but also the source of my greatest agony until I could get it working properly. The final version is a composite of two materials. One for the fog on the window, and the other which handled the reflection/refraction and minor tinting. I used one of the gradients for the fog.. actually, it was used for an opacity map and the material's diffuse and specular were both set to near white and white, respectively. I wanted to show some fog on the window, but ran into problems with loss of clarity when any of the fog had any overlay with an object in the scene. A similar problem occurred with the main material and the reflection, because in the attempt to show an even greater snow storm in the background outside, I was getting severe white-out and loss of clarity and texture detail for the objects inside the house. My solution for that was to use another gradient, this one limiting the reflection to certain portions of the window, namely where the snowman and barely-visible footprints leading away from it are located in the window. I created all of the objects in the scene using CSG, lofting and mesh/vertex editing. The round table and the light that rests on it were both lofts. Unfortunately, all you can see of the round table from this perspective is the top, which is just a cylinder anyhow. The railing of the staircase is a combination of lofting and extrusion (for the banister). The fireplace was all CSG work, except for the wood and ashes below, which were just cylinders that were (vertex) edited and a mesh that has many of its points pulled below the floor of the fireplace. The tree was constructed using >compound object>scatter. I created the branches using cones, twisted and connected them, and then scattered them 120-180 degrees around a cylinder. Did this several times at different branch lengths, and then scattered 3 sided, 3 segment, bent cones around the branches and base cylinders for the pine needles. In all, there were 500,000 polys for the tree alone. The couch has box and cylinder primitives at its base, which were mesh edited and then smoothed out. The window frame is purely CSG, boolean subtract only if I remember correctly. The dog is all mesh editing, at the vertex level mostly. I started with boxes and pushed and pulled until I got the shapes I was looking for. I created all of the objects in separate files, and then merged all of the files together. Two things I learned (I'm still relatively new at this): grouping is a life-, not to mention time!, saver, and a nice little checkbox called "display as box" is even better, for objects like the tree which had my computer thinking for well over 10 minutes on file load and shutdown until I noticed that option. From start to finish, I created all of the necessary textures and objects for this work in 3 weeks. In all, there were over 40 textures, 21 lights and 200 objects at a total poly count of approximately 800K. Probably more detail on some things than you cared to read and too little on others.. please email me if you are interested in a more elaborate description on how I did anything. I'd be happy to help out, if my self- taught methods might be of any use. There was _some_ order to the madness though.. so thanks also to Bill Fleming for the, in my humble opinion, wonderful book "3d Photorealistism Toolkit." While I may not have followed as many of the techniques as advised, I did learn a lot from the book. Thanks for viewing my work and for reading this far into this excessive file. DSI d@daves-house.net