TITLE: Check-Mate
NAME: Toby Green
COUNTRY: Can.
EMAIL: the_dark_allies@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: www.geocities.com/blender211/
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: check.jpg
ZIPFILE: check.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.23

TOOLS USED: 
    Gimp

RENDER TIME: 
    ~40 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.2 Athlon, 0.5 Gig ram, 32 Meg Prosavage


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


        The Red-Kingdom knew something was up that morning the very second a 
pawn had spotted new enemy movement.  The upcoming war was soon inevitable. 
Both 
Red and White kingdoms ventured out onto the battlefield to determine who would
be 
victorious.
        The White side knew they had the advantage due to moving first, and had

exploited this tactic very well.  First a red pawn was slain, then another. 
Soon a chain 
reaction started.  Fearing a checkmate, the last remaining Red Rook gave his
King an 
escort away from the areas under heavy battle.  All the worrisome King could do
was turn 
behind and watch as one of his dominions after another became crushed from the 
numerous opposition.  To make things worse, he had just recently witnessed the
death of 
his Queen and most trusted Bishops!
        BOOM!!  Suddenly the King's escort was blown to bits.  Immediately he 
jumped to the next square aside as he got pelted by the rubble.  Before the King
could 
gather his bearings once again, a White Rook came speeding right towards him,
"CHECK!".
        The King franticly tried to run to the nearest corner, but alas, he was
totally 
surrounded, and the realization hit him that for the first time in his life he
was all alone...

        


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 



        First, I started with the checkboard squares.  Next I made the coasters
on which
all the pieces would be sitting on.  These were made out of nurbs (as well as
the squares), 
and were beveled to help give some highlights.
        I had fun with the pawns, mostly beziers and nurbs with them.  The
castle was 
a combination of nurbs and meshes, though was mostly turned into mesh at the
end.  This
allowed better control for me for the texturing.  The top of the castles have
more than one
material, in order to get the brick layouts on the sides to match those on the
top.
        As for the damaged rook, the broken edges were made by fractal
subdivisions, and
pulling random areas one at a time from the normal.  I layed some of the pieces
down in a
somewhat random order, and tinkered with particles to create a kind of dust
effect from
a building suddenly shattered.  
        The horses turned out better than as I had feared.  I ended up using
sub-surfs for
the nose.  It was good practice for me as I tend to not get around to too much
organic modeling.
It took me a while but I found some rough images of a horses mouth and I studied
them while
trying to mimic them in poly form.
        Getting the king's motion was the hardest part of the whole process.  It
was easy to
set up, however, with motion blur turned on, the render times skyshot.  I
literally ended up
reading a book while waiting between those renders.  I hope it was worth it in
this shot,
though I will probably try to lesson the use of motion blur in later projects
due to it's intense
time demands.
        The lighting system was one of my old favorites.  A half skydome set up
with
spot lights to simulate global illumination.  I would of preferred to use
radiosity, however
blender still has no proper radiosity method that would be feasible for a
project as large
as this.  In fact, the rendering engine appeared to be pushed to it's limits
near the end of
this project, and many times I had to close and restart the application in order
to get a clean
environment between renders.
        All the objects in this project were created in Blender from scratch. 
The textures were
either created from scratch in Gimp, or reworked on from my old bucket of scraps
I've been 
collecting from numerous sources.  Some of the textures you may have seen
before.


          I hope you enjoy this piece of work.