TITLE: Law of Chance
NAME: Andreas Grates
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Andreas.Grates@public.uni-hamburg.de
WEBPAGE: -
TOPIC: Toys & Games
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ag_lawch.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 7 to add signature and convert to JPG

RENDER TIME: 
    about 3h, lost exact measure

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 650 / 320 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


At the heart of the picture is the 11 x 11 array of semitransparent, brightly
coloured dice. Random four of them contain a bright light and provide the
illumination of the whole scene. Which face of the dice is up, how they are
rotated, how far they are off axisparallel and ideal position in the grid,
which of six possible colours the corpus and which of two possible colors the
eyes of the dice have is random, so that any pattern or coincidence is due to
chance.
The array is positioned on a rectangular pedestal made of a plexiglas-like
material, on which also four infinite-seeming stacks of marble-dice foot.
Again, the way they face, their off axisparallel rotation and off center
position are random.
The only landscape visible is the floor - giant-dice, showing random numbers,
coming up to a random heigth.
All objects in the scene are in some way subject to chance and are mere stage
for the wild play of light.
How does it fit to the topic? Many games in a traditional sense of board games
feature an element of chance. In many cases they implement it by a simple toy,
the die. I wanted to show the die with its predominant role as guard of
chance.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Neither modelling nor texturing are worth mentioning much.
Modelling is in large proportions restricted to the dice, which all go back to
one single macro, which delivers an axisparallel die of height 1 standing on
the XZ-plane at 0,0.
It is a simple intersection of a box of uniform length 1 on all edges and a
circle with the diameter sqrt(2).
(Why? Well, in 2D it's easy. I wanted the circular part of the face to touch
each edge at exactly one point. From there it's Pythagoras at most simple.)
The eyes are really made via difference from corpus, spheres reaching half into
the corpus-volume.
The pedestal is ad-hoc CSG without much planning ahead.
Texturing was mainly restricted to choosing a nice texture frome "stones.inc"
(chose T_Stone8, see source) and two finishes from "finish.inc" ("Shiny"
together with everything complete opaque, "Dull" everything else.).
Worth mentioning is the way of generating the colours for the semitransparent
dice. Imagine RGB-colorspace as 3D-cube. Take vector through origin to <1,1,1>
as axis, take perpendicular vector originating at <.5,.5,.5>. Now you can
choose a random colour from a closed colour-circle by rotateing that
perpendicular vector by a random argument! I confined that to six possible
colors and generated (by and large) random numbers from 1 to 6 (with a certain
chance of 0 - didn't seem to be in "rand.inc" to create discrete random numbers
of even distribution. Or just didn't see.).
Maybe it is worth mentioning that every last object of the scene is affected by
some random element. Apart from the camera and the skysphere (not really
visible, but maybe some indirect impact in reflections and radiosity) really
everything is.
There's the dice - they are generated by a single macro, that put's 'em out with
random face up and random rotated by some 90 degrees around the y-axis, for a
start. The pedestal with all that's on it is rotated by something random
between 5 and 40 degrees. The way the array looks and the dice of the columns
are stacked heavily points towards some random "jitter". The giant dice have a
random offset how far they go down from actual 0-level.
And the lighting? Four sources placed random - not completely random, but inside
one of the dice of the array, but random among 121 possibilities.
P.S.: Maybe someone could drop a comment on the signature? I created a file as
"stamp" and would like to know wether to change something.