TITLE: The Wilde Boar NAME: Edward Shaw COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: hes3@lycos.com TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: wildebor.jpg RENDERER USED: trueSpace 4.2 TOOLS USED: trueSpace 4.2, Photoshop 5.5, Poser 4 RENDER TIME: 2 hours 47 minutes HARDWARE USED: 400 Mhz Pentium Desktop w/512 MB mem SCSI hardrive Viper V550 Video Card w/16 MB mem IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I've been told that the connection between "The Wilde Boar" and the idea of fortress may not be as obvious to some others as it is to me, so a word of explanation is probably a good idea, lest I be accused of submitting an entry that is off topic. I remind the reader of the broad sense in which "fortress" is being applied in this contest, i.e., anyplace difficult to get into or out of. Many of those who frequent the tavern environment do so as a way of shutting out the world and the troubles, real or imagined, that it has brought to them. The tavern becomes, for such people, a fortress which protects them, at least for a time, from the intrusions of those of life's realities which they prefer to avoid. In a similar sense, it will sometimes become a place from which they can escape only with great difficulty. If the solace they find within those walls is of a nature that they believe is unavailable anywhere else, they can feel themselves powerless to abandon it, even when it ends up being, as is often the case, an agent of the very suffering from which they seek refuge. My apologies if this comes across as mawkish or maudlin, but there it is. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Creation of this image presented me with numerous obstacles, not the least of which was the fact that I did it using trueSpace4! I guess many would agree that the most important elements in 3D imagery are lighting and texture. One challenging aspect of textures is the difficulty of making tiled textures not so obviously tiled. I encountered this on the wall of "The Wilde Boar." I started with a "rockwall" JPEG I picked up from somewhere on the internet. I tried using it as a bump map as well as a texture map, but didn't like the resulting clutter. Importing the JPEG into Photoshop and then using high-contrast filtering and a bit of manual massaging, I created a new grayscale JPEG that had much less of the information than the original but still lined up perfectly as an overlay. This, then, is what I used as the bump map in tandem with original JPEG as texture. In this way I kept the height information while eliminating that clutter. Additionally, I used the layer displacement feature of trueSpace4 to couple the "rockwall" bump map with a procedural called "casting," introducing thereby a randomness to the overall height info on the wall that would have been impossible to achieve using a tiled bump map alone. In a similar fashion, I used a Photoshop-enhanced grayscale JPEG as a bump map on the door, again in tandem with the original as texture. Once I had the basic scene down, I created a dummy block of buildings "across the street" that I moved around until I had shadow patterns I could tolerate. This, of course, to enhance the apparent depth of the scene. One difficulty I had was getting the glass right, particularly on the upstairs window of the house next door. I couldn't use trueSpace glass because it has to be rendered using ray tracing, which for reasons I didn't have time to explore, created the appearance of translucency in my wood! I ultimately settled on using a simple texture derived from the sky background JPEG that I again massaged first in Photoshop until I got the look I wanted. The figure in the foreground was a Poser-created import. It was at first very sharply outlined all around, in contrast (no pun intended!) to what I desired: that it be somewhat unobtrusive. This is an effect I would normally have accomplished in post-processing using Photoshop, but in order to "play by the rules," I instead used some trueSpace "negative lights" and, by changing their positions and intensity, was able to more smoothly blend the figure with the background.