EMAIL: d@daves-house.net
NAME:  Dave S. Idemoto
TOPIC: CONTRAST
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Left out
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: www.daves-house.net
RENDERER USED: 3ds Max
TOOLS USED: 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop
RENDER TIME: 11hrs 54min
HARDWARE USED: Dual PII Xeon 400Mhz(512k) 512MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Chistmas Eve, 
the parents and child all snug in their beds,
the cat sleeping atop one of their heads,
when young Fido all cold and alone, 
decided to start a fire and a feast of his own...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

For obvious reasons, I'm not pursuing a career as a poet or a writer. ;)

** Disclaimer **********
I'm not that much of an artist (and certainly not great with
editing grammar), either, so many of my methods are probably
the long way around for doing things.  I subscribe to the
Eddy Van Halen school of art. So please bear with me. :)  
****** End Disclaimer **

The concept for the work was inspired one morning when I looked
out of the window of my toasty bedroom at a blizzard which awaited
me outside.  At that moment, nothing said contrast to me more.  I
went through a number of different conceptual drafts, all with a
window playing some central role in developing the contrast within
the scene.  One of the earlier concepts I had was to show the view 
of some pots boiling over with a warm stew on the stove, with a window 
on the far side of the stove and a blizzard outside.  It certainly
had a great deal of the contrast I was looking to create, but it just
didn't inspire me.  After a number of drafts later, I came up with
this scene.  I'll leave the interpretation up to you though.

I created most all of the textures for the scene in photoshop, except
for the wall paper, wrapping paper, and couch fabric, which I found at:
http://www.matmap.com
Thanks go to Emmanuel Corréia for providing this extensive library of
royalty-free textures.

For the textures that I created myself, some were scans that I've done,
but most were just gradients, noise, and clouds that I could tailor to my
exact needs.  I used the noise maps for just about everything, to add
dust and/or surface irregularities.  I used the gradients for the reflection,
opacity and fog maps for the window material.  Oh, and I can't forget the
letter to Santa!  The wood materials, like the floor and table, are scanned
materials, edited in photoshop.  

The glass was not only the bridge in this work, but also the source of my 
greatest agony until I could get it working properly.  The final version is a 
composite of two materials.  One for the fog on the window, and the other which 
handled the reflection/refraction and minor tinting.  I used one of the gradients 
for the fog..  actually, it was used for an opacity map and the material's diffuse 
and specular were both set to near white and white, respectively.  I wanted to 
show some fog on the window, but ran into problems with loss of clarity when 
any of the fog had any overlay with an object in the scene.  A similar problem 
occurred with the main material and the reflection, because in the attempt to
show an even greater snow storm in the background outside, I was getting severe
white-out and loss of clarity and texture detail for the objects inside the
house.  My solution for that was to use another gradient, this one limiting
the reflection to certain portions of the window, namely where the snowman
and barely-visible footprints leading away from it are located in the window.

I created all of the objects in the scene using CSG, lofting and mesh/vertex
editing.  The round table and the light that rests on it were both lofts. 
Unfortunately, all you can see of the round table from this perspective is
the top, which is just a cylinder anyhow.  The railing of the staircase is
a combination of lofting and extrusion (for the banister).  The fireplace
was all CSG work, except for the wood and ashes below, which were just
cylinders that were (vertex) edited and a mesh that has many of its points
pulled below the floor of the fireplace.  The tree was constructed using 
>compound object>scatter.  I created the branches using cones, twisted and
connected them, and then scattered them 120-180 degrees around a cylinder.
Did this several times at different branch lengths, and then scattered 
3 sided, 3 segment, bent cones around the branches and base cylinders for
the pine needles.  In all, there were 500,000 polys for the tree alone.
The couch has box and cylinder primitives at its base, which were mesh
edited and then smoothed out.  The window frame is purely CSG, boolean
subtract only if I remember correctly.  The dog is all mesh editing, at
the vertex level mostly.  I started with boxes and pushed and pulled
until I got the shapes I was looking for.  

I created all of the objects in separate files, and then merged all of
the files together.  Two things I learned (I'm still relatively new at
this): grouping is a life-, not to mention time!, saver, and a nice
little checkbox called "display as box" is even better, for objects like
the tree which had my computer thinking for well over 10 minutes on
file load and shutdown until I noticed that option.  

From start to finish, I created all of the necessary textures and objects
for this work in 3 weeks.  In all, there were over 40 textures, 21 lights
and 200 objects at a total poly count of approximately 800K.  

Probably more detail on some things than you cared to read and too little
on others..  please email me if you are interested in a more elaborate 
description on how I did anything.  I'd be happy to help out, if my self-
taught methods might be of any use.  There was _some_ order to the madness 
though.. so thanks also to Bill Fleming for the, in my humble opinion, 
wonderful book "3d Photorealistism Toolkit."  While I may not have followed 
as many of the techniques as advised, I did learn a lot from the book.  

Thanks for viewing my work and for reading this far into this excessive
file.  

DSI
d@daves-house.net