EMAIL: Andreas.Grates@public.uni-hamburg.de
NAME: Andreas Grates
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: 7 the Hardest Way
COUNTRY: Germany
WEBPAGE: -
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.61
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 7 to add signature/title and convert to JPG
RENDER TIME: 7 hours 57 minutes  6 seconds
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 650 / 320 MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

"6 and 1! That's 7 the hard way!"
"I know harder."
I took up the dice, rattled them a bit in my hands and threw 'em onto the blue woollen table cloth.
For a moment too short to measure, there seemed to be a six and a one.
I waved vaguely with my other hand over the dice and there was a strange glow under thethe dice as if from another world.
Little dice just barely visible, as if made of just a bit more dense air, seemed to circle them both.
Then there was it. Seven eyes looked up into our four.
"7 and 0. That's 7 the hardest way."

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Idea:
There. That's what happens if you don't come up with any idea until one week before deadline. Then you have one, and realize that there's no way you could make it in time. Then you pick up ANOTHER idea from what you've got lying around on your HD.
Why is this matching the topic "Out of Place"? Well? looked at the dice? One eye is clearly out of place! :-)

Modelling:
It's mainly (OK, EXCLUSIVELY) the "dice generator"-macro I used for my entry "Law of Chance", just tuned up a bit.
It uses the same, unchanged geometry and I just added another parameter (I think I, too, changed something in the way the dice get the textures by handing over a parameter) to make the dice "magic" (The 1 disappears XOR 6 to 7).

Texturing:
Real effort went into the texture of the ground. I tried to emulate in blue what you see if go down with your nose onto a snnoker table and have a cloooooooooooooose look. Your eyes will hurt as mine did, but I saw just this slightly turbulent quilted structure. tried with just that, and matching normal. MicroNoise (Bozo pattern, really big magnitude, scaled really small) used.

Lighting:
Two weird experiments folded into one, one with rather promising, one with rather disappointing outcome.
Experiment 1: Dummy-osity (Radiosity with dummies, filed and loaded into scene with real objects).
Dummies for the dice were spheres with rather extreme pigment (color rgb <100,0,0>, color rgb<0,200,0> - green didn't seem to propagate in radiosity as well as red).
Outcome in final render: Source-unlocateable glow under the dice in red and green. This really was the desired effect, and I'm rather pleased with it, though it was hell to drive out the artifacts.
Experiment 2: Dummy-tons (Photons with dummies, filed and loaded into scene with real objects).
Dummies for the small, nearly invisible dicies were highly refracting ones, photons shot from many, rainbow-hued lightsources lined up exclusively lighting the scene. Shot at the big dice as well, simpler pigment in dummy-render, yet same finish.
Outcome in Final render: Effect next to none, except in terms of time-to-render :-(. Must have worked though, since the big dice DO show reflective caustics, but not coloured ones as expected. Someone? REVISION! Just while checking the quality of the conversion to JPG I had the caustic in the green illuminated area in high zoom: It IS coloured! The effect is just rahter less visible than I thought, and about the small dicies... well... don't know?

Miscellania:
Am really looking forward to NOT seeing the comment "TOO DARK", just for once. Sorry for the Moire, but didn't have the time to add focal blur. What's your best recipe against that?