EMAIL: werner.versluys@skynet.be NAME: Werner Versluys TOPIC: Unbelievable COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Rendering 45 COUNTRY: Belgium WEBPAGE: None RENDERER USED: Autocad R14's Photo Raytrace TOOLS USED: Autocad R14 for modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0: for finding the background image on the World Wide Web iPhoto Express 1.1 (Ulead Systems Inc.): for conversion from 1.407 kb BMP to 233 kb JPEG RENDER TIME: about 1 hour 30 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium 200 MMX, 64 mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Imagine a conflict, somewhere in cyberspace. Opposing fractions are pictured RED and BLUE and their battlefield, obviously, is a chess-board. This is not by chance, for chess, to many people a game of strategy and superior tactical insight, is essentially about winning or losing. And how are they doing? Well, many scenarios may have lead to the current situation, where the white queen threatens the black king. Apparently, the BLUE figures are pushing the white pieces around, since one of them is leaning casual against the attacking queen. This, while a black tower, only recently slain, is being removed by a RED player. It's RED's turn now, and they are running out of options. They cannot move their king to safety, nor threaten the attacker; they can only block it's path by means of pawn E6, F7 or horse G8. To move one of these will close the trap and lead inevitable towards a victory for BLUE. And BLUE knows it. They appear confident and relaxed, pointing out the situation to RED and studying the possibility of a new game. As for RED... well, they simply can't believe it ! Note: The tactical situation on this board has been altered many times for reasons of composition. If, therefore, the chess players amongst U see another possible outcome for the situation I described above, please do not hold it against me, for I am only a modest player myself. Let's just assume that RED isn't very good at chess either ! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Concept: The most basic idea I had was to participate in this competition, which was quite a big step since I never actually put a scene together before. I did find it stimulating to work towards a goal and a deadline, meaning that you have to let your creation go at some point. And for the best, I guess, especially since my family is lining up behind me for use of the computer. So I better send it in before they shut down my rendering operations altogether. Modelling and composition: I made the chess-board and pieces some time ago, but without having an actual use for them. Now I did, so they had to be in the scene. The are all made as solids and exact copies of the real thing, meticulously measured. I'm quite pleased with that. Next, there was this K'NEX-figure, a toy I borrowed from my children, that had been standing alongside my computer for some time, waiting to be modelled. Now was a good time and again it turned out to be a fairly good copy. So, I had a chess-board, K'NEX-figures and a topic which I find to be open to interpretation if I have ever seen one. I came up with this: "Two groups having a game of chess with life-size pieces and experiencing a checkmate situation which one group just can't believe". I did lose the checkmate situation along the way, but I find the overall composition to be more important to me. (That is: when I noticed, there was no way back.) To start with, I needed a point of view towards my chess-board, and I wanted to get away from the isometric pespective, affraid it might seem to easy. But every other angle I tried looked weird. Then I realised that the board would seem randomly filled with pieces, chaotic even, so I went back to the isometric perspective: tight geometry as a contrast to (seemingly) random positioning. The actual viewpoint is (-1,-1,0.7) I had to change something :) Next, I needed the tactical layout, something I tried out on the real board first, modifying a situation found in a book to create gaps for the figures to be placed in. Basically, there are two vertical open lanes, one on the left half of the image, one on the right. The center is an open square, marking the vertical line between the white queen and the black king and therefore drawing attention to the main event. Each K'NEX-figure was then saved in a separate file (about 5 mb each) to create the right pose. The file-size made me worry about the final drawing-size (I wanted six figures from the start) so I made a copy every time a figure was added to the scene. If my computer would choke on it, I could always go back one step, but fortunately, that didn't happen. I also had to scale the figures down. They were 1.5 times bigger originally. Their positionning in the scene was made deliberately symetrical because they would draw attention before anything else by means of their color. Therefore they had to be evenly spaced-out around the center. There are two in the upper left, two in the upper right, one down left and one in the down right quarter of the image. Finally, I slightly changed the positions and orientations of the pieces compared to the squares they were standing on. Until then, they were all nicely centered and therefore looking completely unnatural. Textures and mapping: I went somewhat easy on the textures. First, because I imagined that most testing would go to composition and lighting. Secondly, because I had no need for stunning textures in this image (all objects are at some distance from the viewer). Thirdly, since I'm only just learning the basics, I have one rule: keep it simple (I had a chance to try out 3Dstudiomax once, and the material editor still makes me wake up sweating at night). And finally, I am quite happy with the textures that came with Autocad R14 (for now, that is). So, the wood-textures (both white and brown) are standard textures, without changing anything. The K'NEX-figures looked already plastic with their drawing colors, but I assigned a plastic material (grey, blue and red) so I could change the reflection and roughness a bit. All the pieces are mapped in the same way, but the king's cross looked funny. So I made them into separate objects and mapped them differently. They look better now, though it's barely noticeable in the final image. One thing that still bothers me is that the K'NEX-figures don't really seem to be "on" the board. They could easily be a few inches above it (they are not, trust me, but it appears that way). I noticed this after the first test-renderings and I solved it by making the board reflective (mirror, actually). At first, it didn't work because the blue and red from the bottom figures was reflected right on the edge, throwing the whole composition off balance. I then made only the squares mirror, and just a little bit so the reflected legs were barely noticable. It was beautiful and exactly wat I wanted. Unfortunately, all these tests were done with a black background. Once I used the red star-picture (which I had tested with the empty, non-reflective board before) the red background was reflected as well, throwing the whole color-scheme off balance. A moment of frustration, indeed. Especially, since I couldn't solve the problem. I tried some other backgrounds (the typical black-space/white-star images) but they just didn't have the impact this one had. So I abandoned the reflective board, knowing it was the finishing touch but believing that the first impression of an image is probably more important (isn't it?) So another week had gone by, without any significant progress. I did learn something though: making computer generated images is about suffering. And then there is the image within the image. The idea was to repeat the final picture on the map this K'NEX-figure is holding (not an original idea but I like these kind of twists). During all test-renderings I used this previously made background test. Once I replaced it with the final image, it was a disappointment. You could barely recognize the K'NEX-figures, so I changed it back to the test-map and it is much better this way. Lighting: This was my major worry because I had no idea how to tackle this. So I explored some books about photography and found this very basic setup. There is a keylight (pointlight) about 45° to the left, from the viewer's point of view, and 45° up. To soften the shadows, I put a second pointlight about 15° to the left, a bit lower and only half the intensity. I then added a backlight (spotlight) about 105° to the left and 45° up again to produce highlights (same intensity as the keylight). And even a fourth light (pointlight) was added, way above but with low intensity, to make the scene seem evenly illuminated. This should also explain the absence of shadows on the board. I tested with shadows but, believe me, this scene does not need shadows. Once again, it completely disturbed the composition and since I worked hard on that, I wasn't going to ruin my composition with a simple effect. Making computer generated images is about courage, too. Now, since the lights are way up and all the K'NEX-figures are slightly bending forward, there were dark shadows on the inside. I therefore put an extra spotlight on each one of them, shining up to soften these shadows. You don't really notice the presence of these spotlights, but I they weren't there, you would find something to be missing. It then took me several test-tenderings to find the right intensity settings, and even then, I wasn't satisfied. Until I discovered you could turn the ambient light off (intensity=0), and suddenly it looked so much better: the pieces seemed to have a lot more volume. And finally: So that's about it. The drawing file turned out to be 34 mb, which is why I didn't include it. The final rendering was number 45, hence the file name. Most of them took more than an hour. Making computer generated images is mostly about waiting...