December's Games Competition - Games

                               Pacman

                                 by 

                 Reidar Husmo  (reidar.husmo@hiof.no)

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is my entry to December's competition.  I'm
not entirely happy with the result, but I'm leaving for home later today -
where I'll only have access to an SX.  No InterNet access. :-(

At first I had some problems deciding on a suitable object.  I considered a
Yatzee (spl?) block, but decided that I couldn't be bothered making another
'realistic' entry (cf rh_robot.jpg).

As this was being done on a computer, I decided to render a computer game we
all know.  I couldn't make an interesting 'Space Invaders' scene, Tetris is
also a bit droll, but as I watched one of my students (ack! ptui!) it
suddenly struck me.  It had to be a pacman.  And a bucktoothed one at that.
A *cute* pacman; the mother of all pacmen.  

The pacman itself was very quickly designed, and only few changes has been 
made since the first draft.  I'm quite proud of the tongue...

The cherry/apple (can't remember which is in the original game - so the
current version includes an apple with a cherry colour!) wouldn't render
properly under ftpov :-(

The brick walls contains loadsa bricks (>6000?).  Crand gave a good effect
here.  Do yourself a favour - don't turn on antialiasing if your scenes use
crand!  The mortar is also cranded, as is the floor and the tongue.

Finally, there's the monster.  It's stealing up behind our pacman, ready to
take a chew.  Oh, and it's got furry arms/tentacles.  Each arm has 1,200 
objects.

The scene is lit by three arealights, giving varying degrees of soft shadows.

Once more, as the scenefile is >500,000 bytes, I haven't uploaded it.  But
just to tease you, I *have* uploaded the Capov! source code, which produced
the image.  If for no other reason that the tarred and gunzipped source is a
mere ~5000 bytes.

Finally, if Christmas had come about a week later, I would've added motion
blur to the scene.  As it is, it's probably a bit too static.  With motion
blur I could've added wriggling tongues, mouths opening, ...

Hm.

Oh well, got to go pack.

Have fun, and Merry Christmas (probably belated, as most of you won't see
this till January!) and a Happy New Year!

Reidar Husmo