TITLE: Fortresses of the Mind NAME: Michael Lewis & Luke Nakatsukasa COUNTRY: United States of America EMAIL: mlewis@esdevel.com TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mindfort.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1 for MSDOS TOOLS USED: Moray 2.5b.wat for MSDOS TTF2UDO (for text on poster) MSPaint for windows (for height maps on the hair) Microsoft Image Composer v1.0 (for TGA->JPG conversion) RENDER TIME: 50 min 29 sec CREATION TIME: total about 30 hours HARDWARE USED: Intel Celeron 133/64MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: One thing to get out of the way -- the comments from last contest's text file were admittedly unneccessary. Apologies to those concerned. I am a rather opinionated and sometimes stuck up guy; but nobody's perfect. Now, on to raytracing. In a peculiar sort of way, this guy's brain is a fortress--extremely hard to get inside of. I guess that's what the point of this scene is; there's a weird, half-insane computer nerd that's so far gone from the normal realm of the human race that nobody quite understands him. He has built himself a fortress -- on purpose or unwittingly -- and he can no longer be reached or accessed by "outsiders." I chose to do a computer techie because A) I can very easily identify with him. B) I had plenty of trash sitting around my desk to model the scene with. C) its kind of ironic. I'm a lot like this guy. One last note, that is the reason behind the fact that there is no source provided for this scene, which is against my normal principles. It's actually also the reason that some of the modeling is pretty pathetic. What happened was I started this scene at the beginning of the competition and had prototype objects filling all of the gaps where real things needed to appear later; some of the objects were already in place. However, I got stuck with school work and ended up having one afternoon before the deadline to finish things; there fore there is a lot of "cheating" going on. I didn't feel like submitting the source for two reasons, number one it totals at about 3.5 MB and that's a bit much, number two I didn't feel like revealing just how much "cheating" I did. Pretty much its things like the guy's head is turned so I didn't have to do a face; his arm is in his lap and therefore concealed from the camera; the fingers on his visible hand are partially hidden and in a dimly lit area to conceal the rotten modeling there; the cans are only half way modeled (just the tops); and there are dozens more "fudges" I did to speed things up. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist with a supercomputer to see all of the little things like that as well as the half-modeled stuff (esp. the bed, ugh!) Anyway. That's it. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Once again, I owe the cool ideas to Luke. (Thanks also to my parents who provided me with plenty of Coke and tolerated my loud music at 1 A.M.) There are six basic groups of objects in this scene: 1) the computer 2) the trash/cans/etc 3) the poster 4) the guy and his chair 5) the bed and stereo 6) the hut thing that he's inside of THE COMPUTER The monitor is made of a few cubes and a prism object. The screen is actually a shot of my Desktop. The mouse is a basic prism. The keyboard is in two parts; these are the base (a prism) and the keys (cubes) The CPU is the most complex; the actual case is two superquadrics, the drives are mostly simple objects cut up with CSG, and the weird design on the bottom half (modeled after my own CPU) is done with some complicated CSG setups. THE TRASH AND STUFF The paper is all bezier patches with a wierd texture. The book is a pair of prism objects. The cans are CSG'd cylinders or bezier patches (for the crumpled one) THE POSTER A cube with image map. The image was created with PovRay and TTF2UDO. The blue thing holding it to the wall is supposed to be a pushpin, but its too small to tell really. It was created with a lathe object. THE GUY AND HIS CHAIR The chair legs are cubes. The seat is a superquadric. Simple. The computer nerd was a real challenge. The shoe is done with a few basic shapes, some prisms, and a lathe object. The sock on the shoe foot is just a cylinder. The sock on the other foot was done with a bezier patch and a couple cylinders/spheres. The legs are a wierd lathe object with some cylinder/sphere enhancements. The shorts are done with a set of cylinders and a bezier curve or two; the shirt is a bezier patch. The neck is a lathe with some cylinders and spheres for the details. His head was the biggest challenge; the skull is a bezier patch and a lathe put together, the earphones are a lathe and a prism. This leaves the hair; the most interesting part. This was done with a set of height fields and a speckled image made with Paint; the height fields, when transformed properly, will intersect to form the bushy clumps of spiked hair. The arms were also tricky; they are modeled with the same type of objects as everything else, but the fingers are almost exclusively spheres. The wire trailing from the headphones is about 30 cylinders all oriented into that curve shape and scaled to look smooth. THE BED AND STEREO The bed is modeled with cylinders, torii, and cubes. The sheets are actually a cube with the "wrinkles" normal applied. The pillow is a superquadric. (The bed looks a lot like mine...) The stereo is (sort of) similar to one near my computer; the object was modeled with prisms, cylinders, and cubes. The wire mesh effect was done with cylinders and a checkered texture that is one square black, one square clear, etc. THE HUT Its supposed to be a quonset hut, but the effect is sort of lost due to the fact that most of it's not visible. Its actually a lathe object with a plane used as the floor. TEXTURES There's a lot of textures in here, mostly for modeling all of the different types of materials in the room. These were created mostly by trial and error. All of the lights on the monitor/CPU are just smooth pigments. The plasticish texture on the computer parts is just a solid beige color with a lot of small dents. The wood textures are pretty much stock with some changes applied to the normals and the mapping patterns. The stereo texture (blackish) is just that -- a black map with a medium ambient value for the shiny look. The bedframe texture is just a highly turbulent map with some dents applied. The tin/metal textures are all derived from the POVRay SilverMetal texture with a modified normal and some edited finish effects. The floor is a bozo map with some dirt-like colors. The drink cans are just agate textures with a medium turbulence values. All of the paper sheets are a two layered texture with a wrinkly paper like layer underneath a swirled black to transparent gradient that gives the smeared, printed effect. The cloth textures are pretty simple, just solid colors with small wrinkles applied. gasp!