TITLE: The Spell NAME: Gautam N. Lad COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: gautam@interlog.com WEBPAGE: http://www.interlog.com/~gautam TOPIC: Magic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: gnlspell.jpg ZIPFILE: gnlspell.zip RENDERER USED: POV-Ray v3.01.msdos.wat-cwa TOOLS USED: _ Mid Night Modeller v2.10 (Main modeller), _ POV-Ray v3.01.msdos.wat-cwa (Main renderer), _ LView v3.1 (.TGA to .JPG Conversion, Copyright text) _ Dyeworks v1.40 (Various image conversion), _ Xspred v2.02 (anti-aliasing of wall bump map), _ GRAFX 2.00 _94.666% (wall bump map, eyeball, touch-up of book paper, touch up of rat) _ Texture Blender v1.0 - From POV-PAK v1.0 (Used to make pigments for wall, paper, skull), _ MS-Paintbrush (text on spell paper), _ sPatch v1.0 (spell paper. The cuts were removed, after paper was exported as a DXF, in MNM), _ Blob Sculptor (claws for crystal ball, ink blob), _ RAW2POV v1.8 (Skull object & spell paper conversion) _ Tracer Timer v1.0 - From POV-PAK v1.0 (To time rendering), _ ColorDesk Photo (scanning software - book paper texture) RENDER TIME: 1 hours 6 minutes 9 seconds (3969 seconds) HARDWARE USED: _ 486 DX2 50MHz with 8MB of RAM (Computer) _ Logitech ScanMan 256 Color Scanner IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The story behind this image: "It is almost morning, and it is the day when Greshando will take over the kingdom of Nanark, where he is the Head sorcerer. He and his fellow sorcerers have been feed up with the way they are being treated, so they formed a union, and now he, with his fellow magicians, have created this spell. With this spell, they will have the power to control everyone, because it will give the sorcerers the power to know what each person is thinking, and the ability to manipulate one's memory." A note about this story and image: You might want to note how clumsy this sorcerer is. His magical wand is just lying around, ink from the bottle is spilled, and his spell paper is ripped. And what else? He hasn't wiped the blood off the knife, and there is a rat running around. Morning is slowly approacihing (look at the window in the crystal ball's reflection), and it is time! (As you can tell, I'm no story teller!) ;) DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Well, I can certainly say I've improved over time. Anyways, here's how I went about doing the image... First thing I did was created a single claw used for the crystal ball, in Blob Sculptor. My first idea for the scene contained nothing more than a crystal ball, a paper, and a skull. But I needed more objects (as with most of my scenes)!!! So, I then got the idea of the classic skull and candle (candle on top of skull). I got the skull off the Net. I just did a search for SKULL.DXF, and found a that file. But the candle was hard to come up with, so I left the candle for later. I then created a paper in Rhino, made it look old and ripped using MNM, but it didn't suit my needs, and it was a little chunky. So, I used sPatch to make a curved paper extrusion, and then exported it as a smooth DXF. I then used MNM to take some of the triangles out of the edges to give the ripped effect. I then created the texture for the paper, which turned out to be useful for the skull also. The text was added in using PaintBrush, using the Symbols font. I typed in a few words in the first paragraph that make sense, but the rest is gibbrish. See if you can figure out the first paragraph! ;) Next thing was the wall. I wanted a nice bumpy/rocky wall. I couldn't make one out of a built-in normal (bumps, normal_map,etc.), 'cause for one they would've been REAL slow to render, and wouldn't be REALLY bump! So I resorted to a bump_map. I used a small graphics editor to make a B&W wall map, and then anti-aliased it repeatedly using Xspred. The result was exactly what I wanted. Looks rather neat, I must say myself! I then created the wood and table, and then went on to create a candle, a book (w/ random colours), a jar, and an eyeball for the jar. I wanted to create a nice bloby, melted candle, but I didn't know how. I then realized I could use blobs using #while loops, and randomly placing drips. It worked just right. Be sure to look out for a plug-in for this soon. I could've used the ISOSurface patch version and the Candle Plug-in by Chris Young (Dastardly), but I didn't have time to download either. Still, mine doesn't look that bad. It looks greyish, but hey, this sorcerer is a mess - hardly cleans his room! ;) The cloth gave me some troubles, but I managed to make a good one using sPatch. The exported bicubic patch took too long to render, and made the system slow, so I exported it as DXF, and imported in MNM and exported to .RAW, and finally used RAW2POV to make the cloth triangles. That's a lot, but it saves time. Eyeball was also trouble, but it worked OK. I started using an onion color_map, until I realized I could've done the same thing using spheres+cylinders and intersection/difference to make a better eyeball (and I did). You're not going to notice a gradient in the eye, but a single pigment is enough. The latest thing I did was changed the books, and created the ink bottle, quill, and the ink blob. I made the quill entirely in MNM using a closed curved polyline, and then conesweeped, increasing the number of triangles for smoothness. I also added the rat, which would've been hard to model, so I resorted to an image map, with the background invisible (transmittance). I also used GRAFX to remove the white border near the rat's edges. The knife was a last minute idea. Guess where the blood is from (alright, it's related to all those fresh eyeballs)! Overall the image could use some improvements, but it looks pretty good (plus, I'm busy to do anything about it). (Submitted: August 15, 1997) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Spell -- Copyright (C) 1997, Gautam N. Lad. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: If YOU wish to use this image/file for ANY purpose, you MUST first contact me at my e-mail address to notify me. Visit my website to find software/graphics/links, etc. at: http://www.interlog.com/~gautam -----------------------------------------------------------------------------