TITLE: Ipod in D Minor
NAME: Rob Fitzel
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: rfitzel@rogers.com
WEBPAGE: www.fitzel.ca/dart
TOPIC: Music
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rfipoddm.jpg
ZIPFILE: rfipoddm.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.6.1 (64bit)

TOOLS USED: 
    Wings 3D 0.98.32a, DAZ|Studio v1.3.0.1, PoseRay v3.8.18, Paint Shop
Pro 8, Sanrope ColorPicker PRO 3

RENDER TIME: 
    6h35m

HARDWARE USED: 
    originally P4 @ 3GHz (until the "thermal event" -( )
               later:      AMD64 4800+ 3GB RAM :-)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Victoria was thrilled to win two tickets to the symphony. Her boyfriend, Michael
was not as excited. In the midst of the third movement, he decided he had had
enough and decided to listen to something more his style.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I decided early on to have a group of musicians playing together, but the
setting eluded me. I started modelling instruments in Wings and experimented
with the venue.

I tried a concert in the park and one in the middle of a highway (called traffic
jammin'), but I wasn't pleased with the composition. In the end, I turned to a
formal stage and after a few weeks, came up with the idea of an audience member
listening to his own music during a concert.

There are multiple instances of 17 different human models in this scene:
3 violinists, 3 cellists, 3 trumpeters, 2 clarinetists, 1 flutist, 2 french
hornists, 1 timpanist/conductor, and 2 audience members. All the humans were
posed in DAZ|Studio, exported as OBJ and converted to mesh2 using PoseRay. One
of the challenges in this scene was to make it fit into my computer's memory. 
 
Most of the human models memory requirements came from the high res (often
4000x4000) image_maps used to texture them (skin, eyes, hair, clothes). Each
mesh2 instance would reallocate the image_map (even if it was used by another
model).

I used a number of "tricks" to reduce the memory:
- Downsample the textures.
- Replace the texture with a basic pigment (e.g., all the suits are simple rgb
0.1).
- Share textures between models.
- Make the left and right sides of a model different so that they appear to be
different models when only one half is seen. For example, the conductor and
timpanist are the same model. The black and white cellists are the same model -
the left and right sides of the face are coloured differently.
- Position the cloned models such that parts of them are obscured, making it
harder to tell they are exact clones. (For example, the two flutists sitting
next to each other).

Optimizing the texture usage probably recovered about 40-50% of the memory. The
final image still used up about 2.3GB of RAM!

The stage floor is a little macro to draw random lengths of wood. The curtains
are just a bunch of cones squished together. The risers and music stands are
CSG based macros. The chairs are very basic CSG constructs. The spotlight beams
are media filled cones.The included zip contains all the macros to recreate an
empty stage. The human models are the free Michael and Victoria models
available at DAZ (www.daz3d.com) - their clothing is also available from the
DAZ on-line store.

The violins, cellos, flutes, trumpets, clarinets, bassoon, and ipod are all
Wings 3D models I made. The timpani (kettle drums), bass drum, and chimes are
CSG.

More info and details at: http://www.fitzel.ca/dart/music/music.html