TITLE: Subway NAME: Michael Hunter COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: intertek@one.net WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net TOPIC: Speed COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: subway.jpg RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max Version 8 TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps) RENDER TIME: subway station 6h 21m, Car interior 1h 11 m, Man and foreground seats: 25m HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 261 MB RAM All of the objects were modeled and textured by me for this competition with the exception of the photographs that appear in the overhead adds. These photographs have been provided by freephoto.com. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Happy New Year everyone! I've been criticized for being to long winded in my descriptions so I will try to be brief. This is a picture of a Pullman R46 subway car used in New York (at least that's what was rolling when I lived there 14 years ago). For sure there are lots of things that go faster than the subway (top speed of this type of car is about 65 mph or 105 km/h) but there's more to a subway that it's measurable speed. The noise, the rush of air as the car enters the station, the river of people streaming by seem more like the circulatory system of the city. It's alive and pulsating with activity. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I started building the station and the exterior of the subway car. After working on it for a while my good friend Hildur Kolbrun (http://www.simnet.is/hildurka/) suggested that I put the camera inside the train and point it out the window. I hadn't thought about actually making the inside of the train but I really liked the idea of showing two different spaces with different lighting in one image. My problem was limited hardware capacity. I resolved this by rendering the image in stages. First I rendered the station (the stuff outside the car) then used that rendering as a background and rendered the interior on top. I really don't think my machine could have managed it without this process but it also let me workout the problems independently. While I was messing about with lighting inside the station I was also building the interior and while I was working out the lighting for the interior I was building the man which was rendered later on top of the prior two layers. To save time, both in modeling and rendering, only what is visible exists. The car we are in has no external surfaces. The blurry car on the other side of the platform has just a minor suggestion of an interior. The man does not have a face and nothing below his shoulders and only three fingers on his one hand. This scene would look very odd from the opposite direction. It's not easy to find technical drawings of many things. I was able to find the length and width of the subway car (75' x 10' or 2286 cm x 305 cm). Somewhere I read a subway train usually has six to eight cars. So I was able to guess at the length of the station (8x75'= 600' or 183 meters so the length has to be longer than that). Other times I had to go by what looked right from photos and be open minded about adjusting sizes later. All of this bother is very important if you are going after a natural feeling environment. I measured the chair I'm sitting on to get a ballpark idea of how high the seat and back of the subway chairs should be. The size of the subway chair and length of subway car helped me guess at the size and location of the window. I'm probably off here and there but overall I don't think there's anything that looks out of scale. All of the lights are photometric lights. They more closely mimic the physics of actual lights than the standard lights. The lights in the station consist of many linear lights for florescent lights. I used ten area lights within the car. There are a great many rendering options within 3D Studio Max. One major reason for the complication is to provide a means to turn off certain types of calculations when they are not needed or to adjust the accuracy of calculations to reduce rendering times. You can turn off caustic reflections or increase samples of various processes. But the renderer can do more than optimize performance, you can change the anti-aliasing to give a softer focus or to accentuate metallic highlights or for other visual refinements. For those using 3D Studio Max: This image was rendered with Mental Ray with global illumination turned on. I had to turn off final gather as it was causing artifacts after the addition of some geometry into the scene. I haven't yet found the true cause of the artifacts. LINKS: Photos of the real thing (see bottom left of page for links to more photos) http://www.nycsubway.org/cars/r46.html Home page of the above, includes history of NY Subway http://www.nycsubway.org/ Interactive subway map http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/maps/submap.htm Scale map of NY subway and satellite photo of same area http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/subway/ Photos of NY Subway Stations http://www.nycsubway.org/lines/