TITLE: Just how fast is a calculator +3, anyways? NAME: Matthew Hilliard COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: matt.hilliard@ualberta.net TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: enefinal.jpg RENDERER USED: blender 2.20 TOOLS USED: Gimp for texture creation on paper textures, blender for everything else :) RENDER TIME: 32 minutes, 2 seconds HARDWARE USED: Pentium 3-800 w/ 512 MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Ever play (A)D&D? I did a couple times a few years back, and I got a chuckle from the idea of monsters playing Engineers and Escalators, while lying in bed one night. Its dark. Number one peice of feedback I got while making it. If you've ever been in someone's basement playing D&D, you probably will feel the same as I do--its entirely too bright. Can't please everyone, but I got the lighting to where most of my guinea pigs were happy. Anyhow, it turns out that at the final vantage and resolution, you can't read the title on the book "Marketing Handbook," though it is quite legible from other points of view and higher resolutions. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First off, everything here is created by me, except the stone floor and wall textures which I aquired a few years back, and have forgotten where. My apologies to whomever they belong to. Thanks to everone on #blender3d and blender.nl newsserver who provided feedback, you know who you are. I started with a mesh table (aka box) and some points of light for the candles. Created a rapid protoype for each monster, and the screen just to get some idea of placement. Added the slime and stool. The slime is a collection of metaballs, it seemed to be the best way in case I wanted to change it's position or make it biggeer or smaller, or oozier. The ghost was a character I modelled last hallowe'en, although back then it has a pumpkin on its shoulders. Pure mesh. Altered the mesh a bit and created a head, and went for a transparent/emtting look on the material. (Motion blur was an afterthought, I got a suggestion for more of a glow, but I recalled something about ghosts blurring and thought I'd do that instead. The blur extened the render time from 7 mintes to more than 30) At this point I dropped a number of blue lamps into the scene. After I finished the ghost, blender 2.20 was released with a new skeleton deformation system, and I used both the cyclops and dragon as an excuse to test the system out and the "somewhat less recent" subdivision surfaces. The cyclops was first, and the entire cyclops model, pose and texturing took only 3 hours, start to finish. The dragon took somewhat longer. I wasn't sure what sort of dragon I wanted to create. After several protoypes, wound up with the current western-looking dragon (inspired by humming "its so easy" from Pete's Dragon for about 4 hours) I spent the next 3 days testing camera angles, adding finishing touches (especially lamps) and refining textures a bit. I tested a fireplace and contemplated adding pictures to the background, but decided the fireplace distracted from the focus of the players, and the pictures would be too poorly illuminated and piss people off. With the exception of anything paper, the floors and the walls, all of the textures used were built-in blender procedurals.