EMAIL: the_dark_allies@hotmail.com NAME: Toby Green TOPIC: Winter COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Artillery COUNTRY: CAN. WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/blender211/ RENDERER USED: Blender Creator 2.23 TOOLS USED: Terragen, Poser, Gimp (for Windows) RENDER TIME: ~40 minutes HARDWARE USED: Athlon 1.2 / ProSavage / 480 Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Commander Ironberg slowly scanned the horizon. Today was the coldest day yet, and he began to feel frostbit through the light clothing which had been issued months before. The war should of been over a long time ago, but had gone on longer than expected. Now the winter front had set in. 'How many times, in history has this been repeated', he mused to himself. During this new age World War, people were finally becoming used to it since many months had passed. However, the bombardments had stopped for the last few days, as religious holidays had caused a short term break on both sides. While at home children slept in bed dreaming of Santa and parents worried about getting presents in time, the solders on the winter front had other things on their minds. Ironberg scanned the horizon, not with any special optics, but his own eyes to view the landscape in peace. Despite the cold, it was beautiful to see the new fallen snow, instead of two feet of mud that was the only thing to see on the battle-field which they had trudged through all these miles. Now the story may take multiple paths from here: 1. In a quick salute to mother nature, the commander acknowledged the scenery, then went down below to warm up in his machine of death. 2. Viewing the beautiful landscape, suddenly a tremendous bright light in the distance erupted. The commander quickly raised his arm to shield his eyes, knowing exactly what had just happened. Someone had suddenly ended the cease-fire in the worst way possible... 3. It's for your viewing pleasure, up to you to interpret what happens here... Originally, I had planned on making some sort of Christmas theme, but knew this would most likely be done to death. Then suddenly I realized a Winter Front scene would still fit the topic but help add some variation. I liked this project very much, as it let me make my first military vehicle, and I hope to make more sometime soon. Some notes about the vehicle. First of all, it is NOT a tank. It is a howitzer as a matter of fact. However, it is on a tank chassis which makes this a mobile howitzer (many are static). The easiest way to tell the difference, besides the fact that howitzers have larger shells, is that tanks often can turn their turrets 360 degrees, while howitzers have most of their movement vertically, for bombarding targets around 15 to 30 miles away at targets they don't even see. The model here was referenced from an L-33 howitzer. It was a 155mm gun on a Sherman chassis, 41,500kg weight. Originally deployed in Israel. If you note the sides of the vehicle look a bit bare, you are right. The real version a bit plain instead of stylish. I added extra detail in places to add complexity, though didn't want to clutter up the sides and have someone point out that this version varied from the real system. While I had planned to continue to refine this project (texturing/scene/detail/measurements), the deadline for the IRTC is here. All sagas must come to and end right? On a final note here, I ran into physical limits in blender. It got to the point where I kept getting 'too many object' errors during my modeling. I am at the point where it is hard to squeeze anything else in, the few layers supplied are pretty full as it is. Perhaps next time I will try a scene which is simpler, or user another 3D system altogether, such as the amazing PovRay. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: A friend of mine years ago had given me a pocket book on armoured vehicles. From here I selected on doing a L-33 howitzer because it looked appealing to me (Yes, I know everyone is modeling Panzer and Tiger tanks these days). My next step was to download reference images off the internet. I spent a while researching, I found a few images, not too much to go from but they were a help. One problem with my few images was I never could see as much detail as I wanted in areas. Also in places where there was virtually no distinguishable features such as the inner section where the hull connects to be breach, I've had to model guesswork as best I could to make something that looked proper and realistic. Over all I tried to copy it to specs, but I know there can be more refinement, such as the cockpit area. One thing which had me guessing a lot at first is that the few images I had, actually had a lot of variation of items as well from one to the next. I started the modeling by working on the top part and working down. Mostly I used nurbs for modeling, though ended up converting many of them to mesh as I could not get them to be textured properly in blender, and in some instances the application would crash on me altogether. For the texturing, no UV mapping was done. I used the standard projection methods. The only real curvy object which may have needed UV mapping was perhaps the front gear-box, which I had used sub-surfs for. Though the projection tended to work out fine without it. I still needed more complexity for texturing control, and this was carried out by using multiple material indices. This is the first real project I started using indices, and I am liking them a lot for control. Most the texturing was left for last. Though I do like good lighting when I'm working on just the modeling. During the beginning stages a few of you may have seen my work in progress. The lighting method was faked GI. I carried this out by sub dividing an ico-sphere, and duplicating multiple spotlights to the structure, while I deleted the bottom half of the ico-sphere, and made the faces point inward. Thus, I had many spot lamps illuminating the center of the scene with a nice lighting system that looked much more realistic than any default. In order to prevent the large black ring on the ground as commonly seen in fake GI scenes (from outside the ico-sphere), I set the bottom plane to not receive any shadows from the GI. However, I did set up a special large spot light above to shine down and give a shadow to the plane, while letting the texture give out a little emmitance. Note, I had originally wanted to use radiosity, however even setting the bugs aside, it was much too limited, and the workload for a scene like this would have been like beating myself over the head with a baseball bat. First of all, I would have had to convert everything to mesh. Then after the radiosity was run, my mesh would have been combined into 1 object, amoungst other problems. You then have to manually break up each piece afterward, and then re-texture them one by one. And if you don't like how it turned out, you get to go through it all over again, amoungst other things not mentioned. It's a shame that an easier system was not ever implemented since they did put an effort in to do the calculation for radiosity. Usually I tend to not use alpha maps, but the nose piece here was an exception. After making a beved object with a profile curve, I still had to cut out a hole for the shells to pass through. Being one who hates converting things to ugly meshes, I hit on the idea of BURNING a hole through the front with a circular alpha map. This worked splendid, and allowed me to change hole size, curves, etc with much ease. This is one trick you young (and some old) modelers should keep in mind next time you are disgruntled over poor boolean tools (no matter what you need to cut through). The background was modeled in Terragen. Originally I had planed on importing a whole mesh into blender, but realized only the image in the back buffer was necessary. There is one plane used in the scene, which ends and the terragen image fills in the rest. Getting them to integrate together was hard, I tried everything from gradients to praying. However, the render gods just didn't want to give me that class A integration I wanted. This time around for the IRTC I wanted to try out a focal blur for depth of field effect. I thought perhaps it would add some realism and let me experiment with something new yet again. Because blender does not have support for this, I circumvented it by parenting the camera onto a small circle, while keeping it aimed at an empty (null) which I set up as the focal-point. When the circle was turned through animation options, I was able to get the camera to slightly move through 1 frame which caused the blur effect seen. For the terragen image in the background however I used gimp to blur it, using the Gaus system. During the modeling stages I was very disgruntled by the fact I was getting very bad aliasing artifacts, even with the over sampling (ASO) turned full up to level 16. This is quite common with this render system I used and I went looking for a better option besides 'live with it', or 'restart the model'. After some hunting I found some people had found a solution by rendering the image very large, then later on rescaling it down to eliminate artifacts. In the end however, the slight blurring function I created almost magically removed all those artifacts, even those which were very close to the focal point. If using this alias fix method, just be sure to check into how your 2-D application works first, as I have been told some will function very poorly in relation to others for this system. The textures were all post processed in Gimp for Windows. Some of them were made from scratch, while others were edited from my old collection of scraps and bones I throw in my old files when I see something useful. I often tend to stick with targa formats, and try my best not to lose any data during compression. Besides image textures, I also used a few procedurals here and there as well. While I am on the topic of textures, keep in mind when your including an image for a scene in the camera's back-buffer, that if you change the size of your final render, you also should remake the back buffer image to scale, or it may tend to look pixelated and ruin the over-all quality. One thing which attracted a lot of attention when I was working on this, and one of the most asked questions was how did I get the dirt textures to match so well and fade off. This was done by using gradients and alpha maps. Also good tweaking of the texture dimensions/positions when projecting on items also helps. Alright, I will try and end it here as my intent was not to write a whole book on 'the making of irtc...". If you managed to last this long, I do hope you have learned a few tips and tricks, as well as get some pleasure from the resulted scene.