TITLE: The chess game NAME: Gilles Tran COUNTRY: France EMAIL: tran@inapg.inra.fr WEBPAGE: http://www.oyonale.com TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: Povman/Megapov TOOLS USED: Terragen, Poser, 3DWin, Picture Publisher, Meshcomp, UVmapper RENDER TIME: 3 days HARDWARE USED: PIII 733 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Feeling safe within the fortress' walls, the soldiers are playing chess, that old virtual war. But they should be paying more attention to the real world. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: A close up of the soldiers' game is here http://www.oyonale.com/ldc/images/chessdetail1.jpg A tour of the image is here (booo, it's all faked :) !!!) http://www.oyonale.com/ldc/images/chesstour.mpg (585 kb, 100 frames) This is a real place, the oldest fortress in Europe, the city of Carcassonne, in the south of France. See: http://europamedievale.supereva.it/gallery03/main.htm and particularly picture #15, which shows the same buildings from another point of view. I used my own pictures of the place to get the measurements, colours and lighting right, with a large dose of poetic licence. I'm not providing files right now. The scene was built with Povman/Megapov and, at the time of writing, it's not compatible with official Povray 3.1. I'll rewrite some elements of the scene later to be compatible with 3.5 and will put them on my site when 3.5 is out. Roll the credits: The soldiers are Poser models (Knight character) from DAZ (http://www.daz3D.com). The mace, helmet and axe props are from the same pack. I also used the knight map from DAZ because I didn't want to spend a day painting coats of mail. All the objects were converted using 3DWin. The raven is a free Poser prop by Sharkey. See: http://www.cybergate-corp.ch/webdesig/poser3 The flag was created with Christophe Bouffartigue's simcloth feature in Vahur Krouverk's Povman. It's textured with a partly transparent uv map, to turn it into a pennon. See http://tofbouf.free.fr The 3 different types of trees were downloaded from various sources, some of these long dead now. The grass (barely visible) comes from http://www.3Dplants.com, a nice site with lots of free plant meshes. Using mesh trees instead of macro trees made sense since I wanted to use dozens of them, but I could have used my own grass macro... The hand shape was obtained from DAZ' "Michael" Poser character. More on this later. OK, then, what did I make ? The big job was building the fortress itself. I had a close look at my photographs, and from the relative size of the objects there (one of them being your humble servant), I estimated the size of the walls, crenels, windows and such. After that, I modelled them by simple CSG using boxes, cylinders and cones. Once the CSG models were ready, I replaced each primitive by something that would look like old weathered brick and stones, or like tiles. Several techniques were used. The main one was to paste on the boxes height fields generated by Povray itself (using a complex turbulent brick pattern - I'm not 100% happy with that actually). The height fields were pasted on orthographic views of the walls, modified in a paint programme to add crenels and windows, and then used as a basis to paint image maps. For the square towers and buildings, the height fields were fed to a macro that folds them in two to create a smooth, rounded corner instead of a sharp one. For the two round towers, the height field image was used as a pigment to "displace" a cylindrical isosurface. The crenels and steps on the left are isosurface superellipsoids displaced with a turbulent brick pattern. The roofs of the towers were built using individual tiles (individually textured too). For the conic roof, the trick is to define the roof profile (by a function or a spline) and then to rotate the tiles around the y axis. It was a little more tricky for the square roofs. The shale roof on the left is just a triangle + polygon object with a texture (actually a variant of Jeff Lee's brick texture). The window grids were made with the mesh1 isosurface function. The dark streaks were obtained by layering a gradient pattern over the image map. See here http://www.oyonale.com/ldc/images/chessgame04.jpg an early version of the image with the walls and ground still bare and a different sky. The tower shown here was built with individual bricks, but I had problems with close-ups so I gave up and switched to isosurfaces instead. The mountain ground on the left is a height field. I rendered an orthographic top view of the fortress and then used the resulting image as a guide to paint the rocky parts at the right places. The trees and grass were scattered randomly using the trace function. A third loop planted rocks made of random isosurfaces. The sky is an image map made in Terragen. I set up Terragen using the same color and angle for the light than in the Povray scene. In fact, I could have done this with turbulent bozo clouds, some ground fog and a height field, but Terragen is so much simpler to use... It took several hours of tweaking though, as testing and rendering large Terragen images is not so fast. The table, stools, and chessboard were made with CSG. It's a real game in progress. The "hand" in the sky was made as follows. "Michael"'s right hand was posed in Poser, exported as an OBJ file, converted to regular Povray mesh using 3DWin and then converted to PCM using Warp's Meshcomp utility. Then, using Chris Colefax's mesh macros (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/, Meshcomp is also downloadable from there), I extracted the vertices and normals of the hand mesh, and positioned the birds (500 of them) on the vertices, or on the vertex+normal axis (all of this with randomness). Initial versions of the image used a realistic hand but I had two major problems with it: one was that the geometry was not smooth enough and the other was that I didn't know how to paint the giant image and bump maps required to make it look really good. I spent a couple of days experimenting with various texturing ideas until I "found" the current concept (in fact borrowed from Stephen King's novel "The Dark Half"), and then worked to find a correct position I've been only mildly successful at that). There's one light source with a very subtle area light. It's supposed to be June, on Sunday, sometimes in the early afternoon. The image uses radiosity, which accounts for the long render time. The dark places should be lighter but it's going to stay like this.