TITLE: He's so absent (His head is everywhere except on him) NAME: Diego Magnani COUNTRY: Italy EMAIL: diegocg@quipo.it WEBPAGE: none TOPIC: Absence COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: soabsent.jpg RENDERER USED: Blender internal renderer TOOLS USED: Blender 2.42a for modelling, Picture Publisher and Wood Workshop for bitmap textures RENDER TIME: 52 minutes and 10 seconds at 1024x768 HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1700 XP, 512 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I tried to create a scene with a funny surreal atmosphere. First I made a search on my italian-english dictionary for "absence". Like in italian, the sense of "absent" can be referred to a mental condition (absent-minded), in Italy we say "Dove ho la testa?" (Where do I have my head?) So I figure to me a scene with a man without his head, but I found this not enough signicant. It was necessary that the absence of the head was compensated from something that remembered that the head itself could have been there until that moment. So I filled the scene with obsessive presence of copies of the actual object, that confirm the absence of the actual object itself. In this step I added also background with stars. While I experienced to render the scene, casually I tried to remove the walls and the ceiling, leaving all the remaining objects. I was very pleased by the resulting effect of this further absence, I thought that increased the surrealistic mood I was searching. At the present I'm reading a book on "2001. A space odissey", one of my favorite movies, and immediately this headless character sitting all alone in a room suspended in the space reminded me Dave Bowman in the Louis XVI style room at the end of the movie. Therefore I put some references to Kubrick's masterpiece (the armchair on that the character is sitting, the poster on the absent wall). Besides, in 2001 the absence of gravity in the space is very underlined. And in fact in my scene it is present only inside the room, but just beyond the boundaries limited from the invisible walls it not exist any more. There is also something of autobiographical in this headless guy even if he's not my physical self portrait. He's a very creative mind (i'm not sure i am!). Clearly in the beginning he experienced to draw some sketch using traditional media, but only now, sitting at its pc with blender on, he's comfortably sure to reach his goal, recovering his head. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All began from the head. A smoothed cube with a lot of extrude and knife tools operations and a levels 3 Catmull-Clark subsurf modifier added, two spheres for the eyes, then some white clouds (simple flat bezier curves with a little bevel) on the blue sky (voil_ the Magritte's touch!). I rendered this first file and so obtained the texture for pictures on the wall. New file for the room. First, I put a lot of cubes in that cubic room ;-). Then, i model the character with the same method used for the head. Also the jacket and the Louis XVI style armchair are modelled from polygon meshes with subsurf modifiers applied. And so for wall sockets and plugs. I got the wires from 3d bezier open curves beveled with bezier circles. Other furnitures, pc, luxo lamp on the table, the door, cups, pencils, ink bottles, etc. are obtained from simple polygonal modelling. The greater number of objects employ blender built-in materials. The floor and the chest of drawers have some bitmap textures applied, made with Wood Workshop and adjusted in Picture Publisher, while for picture's frames I used procedural built in textures (wood). I put all objects, except for 2001 movie poster and lamp globe, on a layer with several light sources having effect only on it. The lamp hanging from the ceiling contains two spot lights, one pointed to the floor, the other towards the ceiling, and the main light source for the scene, an area light with 16 samples with umbra, dither and noise activated. I put also several sun lights pointed to ceiling, floor and... walls (I keep those lights even after the walls are removed), and some local spot adding more light for the pictures. The poster is on a single layer with his own light source. The crystal globe of the lamp is on their own separate layer too, but it cast transparent shadows on the floor.