TITLE: Emoticons
NAME: Reinhard Pieper
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: reinhard.pieper@web.de
TOPIC: Opposites
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: theatre.jpg
ZIPFILE: theatre.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    Blender 2.40 Alpha 1


TOOLS USED: 

    SSS Script


RENDER TIME: 

    37 sec


HARDWARE USED: 

    AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2GHz, 1 GB RAM, (uncalibrated) LCD Monitor


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The Theatre is a place where the whole spectrum of emotions is shown. "Happy"
and 
"sad" are just two opposite examples. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Concept: 
First thing that came to my mind was "Jeckyl & Hide". But I soon realised that I
would
not dare to try photorealistic human faces. But faces seemed very tempting, so I

went for masks. I did some sketches to develop the shapes and facial
extressions. 
After checking some compositions ("Two-Face", "Yin-Yang", ...) I finally chose
to do 
the "classical theatrical masks" theme.

Modeling:
The challenge for this one was (face-) modeling. Following some very helpful
tutorials I 
started out with the "Sad" mask. The basic procedure was starting with a circle
for the 
eyes, a cube for the nose and half a circle for the mouth and extensively using
extrude,
and loop-cut to build and refine the individual facial features. 
Fortunately "Blender 2.40 Alpha 1" was released in the meantime with its
wonderful 
modifier stack! Using a modifier stack with mirror and subsurf allowed efficient

symmetrical modeling. 
Once satisfied with the separate components it was fairly easy to connect them
with 
extruded faces. Temporarily using bezier curves as guides helped aligning the
vertices 
to achieve the desired curvature of the outer shape. Because of the very
different mask 
shapes it was easier (and something of a training lesson) to model a second mask
from 
scratch compared to reusing and modifying the first one.

Texturing:
Initially I had some intricate weathered, crackled texture in mind. I already
had collected
some interesting reference material. But I could not find a satisfying
procedural 
"crackle-texture", and I ran out of time for designing a sophisticated UV
texture. 
So I decided to go for some experimental texture work. I played around with the
subsurface 
scattering script of the "Make Human Project". Combined with a toon shader I
liked the 
result resembling a translucent smooth glass-ceramics material. 

Lighting:
From very early on I decided to use Layer lights to have lighting control over
each mask 
individually. The "Sad" mask beeing lit from the left, the "Happy" one from the
right.