TITLE: Childish Knightmare NAME: Phil Brewer COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: koden@mindspring.com TOPIC: Dreaming COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: pb_kntmr.jpg ZIPFILE: pb_kntmr.zip RENDERER USED: MegaPov 0.7 TOOLS USED: Rhinocerous 3D, SpilinEditor 1.2, Pick'o'Color, sPatch RENDER TIME: About 88 hours HARDWARE USED: AMD T-bird 1GHz, P3 1GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In the middle of a moonlit night, a young boy's subconcious imagination springs to life. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first IRTC entry. I've been meaning to for a long time now, and a recent visit to the website to see the "Dreaming" topic put me into a brainstorm. This idea came to me as a twist on the theme, and I couldn't resist trying my hand at it. This is also my first real test with radiosity. I'm pleased with the results, but not the rendering time! I actually ran the render on two different machines once I realized that I wouldn't make the deadline with just one computer chugging at it. Most of the objects were modeled in Rhino. These were then exported to POV as meshes. Rhino makes short work of complex models and interfaces well with POV. The RC Car was originally intended to star in it's own POV animation (still might someday) and was modeled mainly with POV primitives with a little S-Patch and Rhino for body panels and wheels respectively. You miss out on a lot of the details at this distance. For example, it has a fully functional, parameter driven suspension system complete with isosurface springs. The building-block castle was created with some POV macro programming. Blocks of random sizes (weighted so standard sizes such as 2x4 are predominate, and so freak sizes don't appear) are placed randomly on the floor in a circle around it. The closet and window frame were created with some POV macro programming. The textures are pretty generic. If I had more time I would have liked to improve on them. In my defense, however, any changes aren't very noticeable with the radiosity lighting model. The posters are my own images. The F-16 was a CAD project from college, the car is a photo from the 2001 North American International Auto Show, and the knight is a union of Rhino render, and scanned in sketch. All were tweaked in Paint Shop Pro. The tricky part was getting the radiosity lighting to work. I had originally intended to leave the window uncovered and let a pool of moonlight spill onto the floor and provide the majority of the light for the room. A bright patch of carpet turned out to be a terrible light source. It had to be entirely too bright to provide sufficient illumination, and I had problems removing radiosity artifacts during rendering. During a weekend trip to a relative's home, I just so happened to see a perfect example of the lighting I wanted in my rendering. Lighting a small room was a set of backlit blinds. When I got home I tried it out, and it worked amazingly well compared to my previous attempt. The blinds are still a little bright, but I'm happy with the amount of illumination in the room. Keep in mind, though, that the image is best viewed in a dark room with a bright monitor. The source code included omits most of the objects for size reasons. The scene is still perfectly renderable as-is with MegaPov 0.7.