TITLE: The Silver Screen NAME: Christian Blouin COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: cblouin@cs.dal.ca WEBPAGE: http://www.ca.dal.ca/~cblouin/Blouin/ (raytracing sub-page yet to be published) TOPIC: Great Invention COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: silvrscr.jpg ZIPFILE: silvrscr.zip RENDERER USED: povray 3.5 TOOLS USED: Modeling Povray 3.5 Moray Wing 3D (www.wings3d.com) Terragen Textures (additional): Paint shop pro 7.2 RENDER TIME: 3 X 9h 40min HARDWARE USED: Dual Xeon 2.4GHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Silver Screen - If I had to name only one art form that is largely driven by (technical) invention, it probably would be the Cinema. This scene is inspired from the movie "Shadow of the vampire", a fiction about the actual shooting of the 1922 classic: Nosferatu. In the movie, the director makes a deal with a real vampire to pretend to be an eccentric actor playing a vampire. Invention being the theme, I intended to mangle reality and fiction in this scene by having Nosferatu use a projection on the wall to _return_ back to the Carpathians. In the earlier days, the line between art and mad science was all the more blurred as the crew was wearing lab coats while on the set! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This is my first IRTC entry and truly my real attempt to make a finished scene. I went a long way in the last two months, believe me. Modeling Most of the items in this scene are procedurally generated: The movie set railing system, the reel shelves, the paper clutter on the floor. I used Moray to get the spline to look good to model the reel case, but other items such as the light projectors were designed from scratch with the most compact code as possible. I ended-up creating a few macros in the process to generate clutter and the movie set railing. The shelves containing film reel cases are populated using a hidden Markov process to generate the texture and the stacks. I intend, in the near future, to write up a general purpose macro for this random model which allows to create heterogeneity while still using a uniform random number generator. Nosferatu was my very first attempt at doing mesh modeling. I used Wing 3D, a wild and free subdivision surface software. I exported to povray mesh2 structure using the plug-in from Danni Coy (http://www.midcoast.com.au/~rgcoy/software.html). The table, chairs and the raven are also modeled from scratch using subdivision. This was great fun. The image_map used to project on the back wall was generated using Terragen. The terrain model is a fractal that meant to resemble a bit to a Carpathian vista. I wanted to use forester to make a composite image including a castle, a few tortured trees and some circling crows. Forester didn't want to cooperate this time around. The terragen sourcefiles are included in the zip archive but there is nothing special about them. Texturing Most textures in this scene were created using the help of Moray to preview the result. The fanciest texture made was applied on the floor: I used a texture_map to define where the wear on the floor's wax was the most marked. In low light, this neat effect doesn't show as much as I would have liked. Anyhow, texture maps are most useful. Lighting and rendering I wanted a cold looking scene to emphasize the artificial elements and to polarize the lighting of the scene between the fake set and the "true" landscape. Some radiosity gives depth and more contrasts. The final touch comes from a focal_blur centered around Nosferatu and the raven.