TITLE: Within A World of Wonder NAME: Charles H. Rousseau COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: rousseauc@bellarmineprep.org TOPIC: Museums COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: chrmuseo.jpg RENDERER USED: Bryce 5.0 TOOLS USED: Rhino 2.0 RENDER TIME: 8.5 hours HARDWARE USED: Windows PC IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The image was intended to convey the entry into a contemporary museum of science and technology; many that I have visited tend to be more of a hodge-podge collection of whatever is available to show. I originally meant to create a more traditional setting with acres of display cabinets of models and stuffed dead things, but I could not get excited about that. In our part of Washington state we have an air museum with planes hanging from the ceiling and will soon have a car museum in Tacoma to go with some natural history/state history sorts of facilities and I was trying to capture the mood of all of these. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The showcase in the background was originally intended to be the focal point of the image, a corner in a somewhat old and dusty museum. The case contains a map of the world and several fossil skulls from different continents with appropriate scientific tags. But as I began to play with the possible shapes of the surrounding environment, I began to move from a rectangular, one-floor shape to an oval, multi-story structure with galleries and spiral staircases. As the camera was backed farther away from the fossil case, more and more elements were required to give it a sense of reality. A few of the images are visual cheats, flat images with an alpha channel concealing their edges, but there are over 80 individual mesh models, some copied from pictures in magazines--the lamps are modeled after those in a church in Portland, Oregon. The plane, the car and the junk originally came from a CD collection of low-polygon models which I imported into Rhino and rebuilt by substitution several of the more 'puffy parts' which were of such low resolution that they looked inflated with air. The sign and rope and pole-set, the showcase, furniture and museum structure were all original and I am particularly pleased with the spiral staircases, one of the elements from this project which I have already removed and saved separately for another use. The suit of armor is parts from two different models resized to make one and I wish I had brought it closer to the front. The animals are flat images with alpha channels whose edges don't show up in the lighting. Several of the other items are just odds and ends I had in model folders. The whole set was assembled into Rhino and exported as a set of .3ds files into Bryce where everything was textured and lit and rendered a few times to try for an image which responded to the critiques of my previous entries--too dark, too blurry, not enough shadows or reflections. Hopefully this image is well-lit, sharp around the edges with lots of shadows and reflections. It was fun.