TITLE: No Aspirin needed! NAME: Benoit Kloeckner COUNTRY: France EMAIL: benoit.kloeckner@free.fr WEBPAGE: piqueselle.free.fr TOPIC: Minimalism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: games.jpg ZIPFILE: games.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.6 TOOLS USED: The Gimp v2.0 RENDER TIME: 14 hours HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4, 2 GHz, RAM 384 Mo IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Games can be very complicated, but reduce just one parameter, and they become much more simpler. Unfortunately, as for bikinis, they follow "the smaller, the more expensive" rule. The same than casino: minimal brain usage, maximal bank account damage. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I was very enthousiast when I saw the topic, as I am fond of the short code images (see my other submission). But I had time to make a more technical image this summer, so I started to search an idea. It started with a 4x4 chess board. I planed to present it alone. The pieces are intend to have minimalist style, with just what is necessary to recognize them. They are CSG (with many hyperbolas) except for the upper part of the knight that is an symmetrized height field. There were two tricky parts. The first was to compute the parameters to smoothly place tori on the hyperbolas, to make them round at top and bottom. The computation is not difficult by itself, but there are three kind of mathematicians: those who can compute and those who can't. The second was to design the knights; I used paths and gaussian blur in the Gimp, but there is still an angle between the two sides (invisible on the image). In fact I choose to put knights and not bishops because it was more challenging. The texture are simple (procedural, two layers) variations on standard textures of stones.inc. After that I got the idea of a 2x2x2 rubik's cube. It was very simple to model, but know with two games I had to do more of them. The Draughts set was an easy one, of course. For the wood textures I just modified some from woods.inc. I already had an unfinished goban and stones in my stuff, so it didn't took long to make a smaller version. I chose not to put the stones in a play shape because it would have shown that 5x5 go really is boring. Then the Othello game came up to my mind. For the plastic part of the board, I designed a height field with the gimp. It was the simplest and better looking solution I could imagine. For the texture of the green board, I did not try some complicated method and just used crand. Last, abalone. The big problem was the little plots between the holes. I did not want to learn to use a mesh modeller (at least it almost convinced me), and end up with a CSG version that is not exactely right. The right plots are rounded and cut cylinders, mine are rounded polyhedras. But it looks ok even from quite short distance. The rest of the board is more or less simple CSG. Total it is several hundred pieces, and most of the render time is due to it. Then I had to put all this games together. I chose a store because I wanted the "no aspirin!" labels. To had details, I made visible the layers of wall paper (just small cylinders with filter patterned pigment). The wood texture of the shelves is again an adaptation of some wood.inc texture. The price tags are once more designed with the gimp. I add a not-too-white filter pigment and a not-too-flat normal. I just had left to set the lights (I think it is the next domain I should learn in more details; here there are just a few white fading area lights), camera and radiosity settings. I do not know if focal blur could add something, it seemed useless here.