TITLE: When Androids Fall In Love NAME: Michael Hunter COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: intertek@one.net WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net TOPIC: Future COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: and_love.jpg ZIPFILE: and_love.zip RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max Version 6.0 TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps) RENDER TIME: 9 Minutes @ 2600 x 1440 HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 261 MB RAM THANKS: Before I start talking about my picture, I'd like to thank all of you for your helpful comments. Your feedback has helped me know if I succeeded in my goals and if those goals are even worth perusing. I think I have something unusual for you this time and I'm very much looking forward to hearing your reactions! IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The "girl" android has just opened a heart shaped box from her boyfriend robot. He wanted to do something special - something old fashioned and romantic for her. Since he had no heart of his own to give her, he picked a fresh one and put it lovingly into a heart shaped box. She, sitting before her vanity table with perfume and oil can, is understandably touched by the romantic gesture. The picture pokes fun at artificial intelligence. But only in that it will never really comprehend things like love regardless of how sophisticated the androids might be otherwise. (Just imagine two robots kissing... all that metal rubbing against metal... it would be about as sensual as a car wreck!) On a deeper level my picture is about our place in a world filled with technology. What do we offer this world? Machines do everything better, faster, cheaper, longer. I can't swim as well as a boat. I can't fly at all so airplanes beat me there. Cars go faster and longer than I. A simple calculator is far better at math. What good am I? The answer... I can love. I can hate. I appreciate the world. I have an awareness of my own existence. There is no sense to do things better if there is no one to appreciate it. There are so many pictures of extra masculine robots with huge guns and doomsday views of shattered human culture. Deep or not I wanted to put something into this round that would be funny, fresh and different. I started in the usual way making complicated shapes and textures but after a while I saw that the picture was looking to slick and fancy. The robot looked too glamorous. I wanted "the robot next door" look. So after much internal struggle I gave up the fancy simulated environment for a simpler cartoon look - a retro-Barbie look. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The flat cartoon style is created using a type of material or shader called, in 3D Studio Max terms, "Ink 'n Paint". Once this material is set up and applied shadows are minimized and lines are added around edges. (the zip file has a screen capture of this scene with the interface for this material.) Unfortunately the toon shader that ships with 3D Studio Max is hard to control. Lines that are within the silhouette of an object are often omitted. The only resolution I found was to break off the part were the line should be into a separate object. After much fooling around I think I got it to work reasonably well. Though I should suggest that there are third party plug-ins that may do a better job. Another problem with this shader occurs in conjunction with ray traced reflections. The line quality changes dramatically. I was forced to render the scene from the mirror perspective and then map that image onto the mirror. This would obviously not work well in animation. The text is extruded and warped with a "FFD 3x3x3 modifier" (this places a cage with control points around an object. When the cage is deformed the vertices of the enclosed object are contorted to remain in the same orientation with in the cage). This is a faster and more effective method than tweaking each CV. The Boy friend was rendered separately then mapped onto the flat thought bubble shape. Her arms are lofted circles that have been scaled along the path. (I was trying to get a retro 50's look like the robot from "Lost In Space").