TITLE: Little red riding dragon NAME: Gilles Tran COUNTRY: France EMAIL: tran@inapg.inra.fr WEBPAGE: http://www.oyonale.com TOPIC: Spirit of Asia COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: gt_asia.jpg RENDERER USED: Povray 3.5 beta TOOLS USED: Poser 4, Amapi 4, 3DWIN, UVmapper, Picture Publisher RENDER TIME: 5 days, 1 Gb RAM used, 250 Mb of scene file and associated objects HARDWARE USED: PIII 733, Windows NT4 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Asia is such a vast continent, made up of so many cultures and peoples that to say that it has a ?spirit? sounds a little colonial to me. I don?t think there?s a spirit of Europe, Americas, Africa, or Oceania, so why Asia? That said, for the average non-Asian person, Asia surely evokes a incredible number of clich_s and stereotypes, and while we can?t take these at face value (like these kids who asked Tibetan monks about their kung-fu skills) we must recognise that these clich_s and stereotypes do exist and bear with them. So what?s Asia today? A good place to start is Hong Kong, as seen through the eyes of movie directors like Wong Kar Wa_ or Tsui Hark. WKW was actually the main inspiration for this picture, as he symbolises, through his work, how Asian cultures are now facing / assimilating / reinventing other cultures (European, American, Muslim etc.). In ?Chunking Express?, Tony Leung and Faye Wong have a mute meeting with Faye?s cover of the Cranberries hit ?Dreams? in the background. In ?Happy together?, Tony Leung and his boyfriend end up in Buenos Aires. In ? In the mood for love?, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung split up with Nat King Cole?s ?Aquellos Ojos verdes? in the background, and Tony finds himself looking for her in Cambodia. In this IRTC image, this is not Chunking, but a variation on Nathan Road and Kowloon, trying to express my own Asian clich_: Asia is changing, and changing fast. And yes, the image on the TV set was shown on CNN on Sept 11, 2001, and the hour is 23:10, Hong-Kong time. It?s a small world. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: A great amount of time was dedicated to research: photographs, ideographs, logotypes, signs, patterns. There?s a large number of image maps used in this picture. Some were created from scratch (I ?wrote? Chinese by pasting Unicode characters from web pages into Word), other were derived from photographs and heavily processed with Picture Publisher. This meant a lot of 2D work, as there are more than 40 different signs (and many other maps). Here are some links to pictures I used: http://www.la-grange.net/photos/2001/05/Hong-Kong/index.html http://larve.net/people/hugo/pictures/2001/04/28/mongkok http://www.china-on-site.com/gallery/index.html The larger characters are Poser/DAZ ones (Michael, Victoria 2, Millennium kids, various morphs, props and clothes packs, wedge hair, gel cut hair, Hollywood hair, clock, sunglasses and related textures). The smaller ones are just bitmap ?cardboard cutouts? also made in Poser, posed and lighted to make them fit in the picture. Cars are anonymous Internet ones or models by Miguel de Espona (available at Turbosquid). The tricycle is the work of "Abraham" (Renderosity). The beer cans were created by Fabien Mosen. The portable phone is the work of Sebastien Loss (Hamapatch model). Things I?ve done: Amapi was used to model the bowl and the chopsticks. Regular CSG was used for the bus, the restaurants, the buildings, the signs, some other street elements, the Pepsi machine, the table, the TV set etc. The building on the right is inspired by a real-life one which is actually in Shangha_ (it lacks the air-conditioning). The noodle restaurant on the right was also modelled after a real one in Cambridge (see http://www.winfield58.co.uk/yingwah/yingwah.htm). Other CSG was lifted/adapted from previous images of mine (the fire hydrant, a couple of shop windows). There are over a 100 light sources, and a good number of light groups (whenever I wanted a particular highlight). The reflections are too dark because I had to lower the max_trace_level and raise adc_bailout otherwise both the rendering time and the memory use (1 Gb...) were unbearable. It doesn?t use radiosity. Different techniques were used to create the neon signs: media, plain ambient 1 image maps, height fields with transparent textures. I also played with DF3s but these signs didn?t make it in the final image. In fact, a more realistic neon tube was made but it required a too high max_trace_level. Several macros were used to create the sign frames and support beams. All signs emit light. A good part of the time was spent creating the signs and positioning them. Rounded isosurface boxes were used whenever possible. The sidewalk is made with rounded boxes with granite deformation (it?s still too clean and even). Rounded iso boxes are the greatest Povray 3.5 addition since sliced bread (which was added in Povray 3.1). Many textures are mixtures of image maps and procedural ones. Dirtying, particularly, is done in some cases by using the same texture with different diffuse value within a texture_map. For hair textures, I?m presently favouring the newer image_pattern with texture_map technique over the use of alpha maps. Two good reasons: 1) the image_pattern image can be a relatively small jpeg and 2) transparent parts can be really transparent (no highlights). Problems: many of them. It?s not a very good picture. I got somehow too ambitious about this one and the result is less satisfying than it should be. Absence of radiosity makes it not too realistic. This may not be a real issue but still? The image lacks a real topic (and the general setup is too close to my IRTC ?Wet bird? image of April 2000). The signs should have been the topic, not the characters. The left part should have been brighter and the right part darker to make the signs and the tricycle stand out better. I got to see this before the final render, but I didn?t correct it enough. The little Poser people just look like Poser people, i.e. poserish. I ran out of time to make more of them, and to make them nicer. There really should be more people in the street. There are also many little things that would have needed more attention. Blurred reflection should have been used on the ground, but memory use and render time decided otherwise. I?m not releasing the code because it?s a big mess (2500 lines or so, not including the meshes), requires 100 or so image maps and uses copyrighted material. However, some of it will be available in the resources section of www.oyonale.com somewhere in 2002: the bus, the noodle restaurant, the building on the right, the neon macros and a few other things, when I have cleaned up the code.