EMAIL: intertek@one.net
NAME: Michael Hunter
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Earl Was Also A Pretty Good Dentist: The story of how I lost my first tooth
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net
RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max Version 8 SP3, Mental Ray
TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max, PhotoShop for texture maps <- NO POSER HERE!
RENDER TIME: 1 Hour 24 Minutes 22 Seconds @ 1500x720
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 768 MB RAM

URGENT WARNING: Do not attempt this at home! Dentistry is best left in the capable hands of dentists.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
I know what you're going to say... there's nothing absent in this picture. This picture takes place just before the item in question, a tooth in this case, became absent. And is focussed in on the issue of how this absent tooth came to be.

The tooth must go - that is a given - but the question of how is the matter at hand. Earl, the resident home dentist, has decided on a rapid resolution to the problem. Having affixed one end of a string to the tooth and the other end to a closet door he is poised for success.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
Concept:
The idea came to mind just as soon as I heard the topic. I did a couple sketches on paper then combined the best elements of each sketch into a master sketch. From these sketches it was obvious that the story depended on two delicate matters; the pose of Earl and the pose of the boy. Regardless of the style the body language had to be right to carry the idea across. The boy had to be stoically braced waiting his moment of dread. Earl needed to contrast the boy. Earl had to be enthusiastic and dynamic. Actually the character I had in mind for door slammer was the boy's mother but I felt uneasy with showing a mother doing such a thing.

From early on I noticed that the center of the image was a wall seen straight on. I tried to avoid this by putting the picture of the Uncle in the middle of the wall but being in that central location the picture stole the show. Finally I gave in and let the space be... empty... well it's not really empty there's a wall there but I don't have a better word for it. It's taken me some time to come to peace with this violation of traditional composition. It's really a novel aspect of this image. You'd have to look hard to find another image with something so annoying, so intentionally vacant. Everything happens around this whole and you find yourself hopping back and forth over it to get to the other half of the story. It's kind of funny. Who the hell would be so ignorant or arrogant to do that? On the other hand if you didn't care for my reasoning about absents above here's your second chance to be won over.

Mesh Types
I began work constructing the boy. (I used a polymesh rather than my usual editable mesh because I noticed that the editing tools are more sophisticated. To be honest I don't really know the difference between the two types of geometry other than the tool set is different. If you could educate me on this fine point I would appreciate it.)

Modeling People
When working with people of my own design I like to have a couple of quick, paper based sketches to record the spirit of the idea but I only use these drawings as a reference rather than making a technical drawing as a view-port background and essentially tracing over it. By treating the 3D model independently of the drawing I spare myself the headache of drawing a technical drawing of something so organic and flowing. Also I'm hoping for small differences between my original drawings and the 3D model. Whenever there is a difference I get to choose which is better. But I think the best part of sculpting a model without ridged guidelines is that it's easier to be expressive. Really... it's hard enough to be expressive with a lump of clay, bring the 3D on a computer with procedures to follow and it's much harder then add a ridged guidelines and it's purely impossible to catch the spark of life.

When making people it's easiest to work on the left or right side of the body while having a mirrored instance reflecting the other half while you work. This way if the eye is too far from the center you can see it as you work. Eventually, after a considerable amount of tweaking the other side can be made copied mirrored and attached to make full body. Even after the two parts are joined you can - maybe you should - look for ways to make one side different from the other.

Hair
I used the "Hair and Fur" plug-in for the boy. It seemed less cumbersome to create a wig for him. To do this you actually create a mesh that matches the shape of the head but doesn't extend past the hairline. This object can be made invisible to the camera yet support hair that is visible. If you haven't worked with virtual hair before it's a bit strange. The tools in 3DSM (3D Studio Max) let you comb, cut, and grow the hair interactively. At times I felt like a barber. You can change how frizzy or kinky the hair is the number of segments of each hair, number of hairs, hair color and variation and many other parameters. In version 9 of 3DSM there are several updates to this plug-in that make it easier to work with.

Posing Earl
By the time I had finished the boy Earl leapt into my mind and I knew he was right for the part or door slammer. For the most part Earl was built much like the boy. One difference was his exaggerated pose. If I were making an animation I would have built a skeleton system for him and set up the necessary controls to permit the bending of bone joints to bend corresponding groups of control points. But since I only needed Earl to be in one pose I decided to bend him into place manually. It was for sure a technological shortcut but bending a mesh of 10,000 polygons is... It was like making a sculpture out of aluminum foil, then putting the sculpture into your pocket while going horseback riding. Then once bent up trying desperately to make sense of the crumpled mess. Yes I suppose it was faster but there were times when I wondered if I would ever get Earl back into a recognizable condition. This is a point where 3D is cumbersome for a still image. Sure, if you are making an animation for say a Saturday morning cartoon, it's no problem spending a week to rig up a reusable character. I don't think anyone ever suspected making a character for one image.

Lighting
The lighting in the scene is a bit tricky. This is especially true for the lamp. I tackled this problem by dividing it into parts and solving each independently. 

For example, the lampshade had to look like light was glowing though it. To get this affect I turned up "Self Illumination" up to 100%. This doesn't, by itself, cause a surface to emit light. By setting self illumination to 100% the surface is rendered its local color independent of lighting. The surface doesn't receive shadows or highlights. I mapped a bitmap to each face of the lampshade with a lighter color in the center and darker colors at the edges. This gave the impression of a glowing shade yet required very little processing power when rendering.

The next aspect of the problem to solve was the shadow of the lampshade on the wall. Though the shade is eight sided I wanted it to cast a shadow as if it where a simple cylinder (the angles in the shade produce distracting angles in the shadow). I also wanted the shadow to be more opaque at the top and bottom where a real lampshade would normally have a wire internal frame. The light in the center of the lamp had to not cast a shadow for the real lampshade but cast a shadow for an invisible shade of a slightly different design. Fortunately for me you can specify objects to be included or excluded from a light. The lampshade that casts it shadow is a cylinder with the following horizontal bands of color: Black, White, Light Blue, White, and Black. I changed it's properties sow it would be invisible to the camera. And the "Extended Parameters" of the texture specifies it's Advanced Transparency is of a "Subtractive" nature. What all this babble means is the transparent cylinder casts colors opposite of it's surface color. The rings of color mapped to the cylinder project White, Black (no light), Deep Yellow, Black (no light), and White.

Finally, when I was getting close to completion of the image as a whole, I thought the light on the boy's back was not as orange as it should be. This was an artistic decision rather than a matter of physics. I created a new yellow light, near the lamp and restricted it to illuminate only the boy.

There are two other lights in the scene. Fortunately these were less complex to setup. These are large area lights - a white one on the right and a yellow one on the left. These two lights fill-in the scene as if there were windows and other light sources in the rest of the room.