EMAIL: the_dark_allies@hotmail.com NAME: Toby Green TOPIC: Loneliness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Check-Mate COUNTRY: Can. WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/blender211/ RENDERER USED: Blender 2.23 TOOLS USED: Gimp RENDER TIME: ~40 minutes HARDWARE USED: 1.2 Athlon, 0.5 Gig ram, 32 Meg Prosavage IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Red-Kingdom knew something was up that morning the very second a pawn had spotted new enemy movement. The upcoming war was soon inevitable. Both Red and White kingdoms ventured out onto the battlefield to determine who would be victorious. The White side knew they had the advantage due to moving first, and had exploited this tactic very well. First a red pawn was slain, then another. Soon a chain reaction started. Fearing a checkmate, the last remaining Red Rook gave his King an escort away from the areas under heavy battle. All the worrisome King could do was turn behind and watch as one of his dominions after another became crushed from the numerous opposition. To make things worse, he had just recently witnessed the death of his Queen and most trusted Bishops! BOOM!! Suddenly the King's escort was blown to bits. Immediately he jumped to the next square aside as he got pelted by the rubble. Before the King could gather his bearings once again, a White Rook came speeding right towards him, "CHECK!". The King franticly tried to run to the nearest corner, but alas, he was totally surrounded, and the realization hit him that for the first time in his life he was all alone... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First, I started with the checkboard squares. Next I made the coasters on which all the pieces would be sitting on. These were made out of nurbs (as well as the squares), and were beveled to help give some highlights. I had fun with the pawns, mostly beziers and nurbs with them. The castle was a combination of nurbs and meshes, though was mostly turned into mesh at the end. This allowed better control for me for the texturing. The top of the castles have more than one material, in order to get the brick layouts on the sides to match those on the top. As for the damaged rook, the broken edges were made by fractal subdivisions, and pulling random areas one at a time from the normal. I layed some of the pieces down in a somewhat random order, and tinkered with particles to create a kind of dust effect from a building suddenly shattered. The horses turned out better than as I had feared. I ended up using sub-surfs for the nose. It was good practice for me as I tend to not get around to too much organic modeling. It took me a while but I found some rough images of a horses mouth and I studied them while trying to mimic them in poly form. Getting the king's motion was the hardest part of the whole process. It was easy to set up, however, with motion blur turned on, the render times skyshot. I literally ended up reading a book while waiting between those renders. I hope it was worth it in this shot, though I will probably try to lesson the use of motion blur in later projects due to it's intense time demands. The lighting system was one of my old favorites. A half skydome set up with spot lights to simulate global illumination. I would of preferred to use radiosity, however blender still has no proper radiosity method that would be feasible for a project as large as this. In fact, the rendering engine appeared to be pushed to it's limits near the end of this project, and many times I had to close and restart the application in order to get a clean environment between renders. All the objects in this project were created in Blender from scratch. The textures were either created from scratch in Gimp, or reworked on from my old bucket of scraps I've been collecting from numerous sources. Some of the textures you may have seen before. I hope you enjoy this piece of work.