EMAIL: famrom@ran.es NAME: Guillermo Sanz Romero TOPIC: Glass COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Come on, dice! WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/4774/ http://www.ran.es/~famrom/ RENDERER USED: POVRay 3.01.msdos.wat-cwa TOOLS USED: DOS Edit and Micrografx Picture Publisher 5.0 RENDER TIME: 22h 6m 42s HARDWARE USED: PC i486DX2-66Mhz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "Today I feel lucky!" :D "Throw that dice again then." :) "Seven wins ... no more bets." DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This topic was hard, specially when the computer is only a 486. So I started a list of ideas (the bimonthly list, should be named). First I tried a world made of glass (a metaphor) but that did not convince me. The next was a stained glass window, but after having problems with spotlights, atmosphere and time (I thinking about a buying new computer) it was discarded too. The final idea was two dice lying on the table: a simple but possible scene. They are transparent plastic, but glass topic covered things that have refraction (remember MaryAnn's message and curtopic.html). Obviously it should be fast (not more than a day to render) but real. First I created the die in two versions: fast (a box, for tests) and slow (a superellipsoid), with some spheres to carve the holes. The texture was tested many times, until the plastic appearance was real (I think it is). The objects were easy (I must admit it), but the texture doesn't. Then a table was made. Well, only the horizontal part and a side. The main part is cloth with a white line to avoid "empty space" (a thin box). The side is covered with green rubber, so I created a small pyramid and copied it with loops (#while). The two tokens are an intersection of a sphere and a cylinder, to obtain the curved edge. To increase detail without distracting the observer I made a little recess and added the metal (gold for the blue, silver for the yellow one) numbers. These numbers are two heightfields. The texture was simple (dull plastic) to keep the focus where it must be, the dice. For lighting I first used one light, but then changed to one normal light (for global light) and a smooth spotlight (to emphasize the dice). The spot angles were calculated rendering the scene form the light's point of view, in few test I got the angles needed for the spotlight. The dice then were moved from the surface to the air, so they changed their results (four and three) to a more random angle, floating a few centimeters over the surface. But this asked for some kind of special effect to give sense of motion. POV has not motion blur, and faking it with multiple objects will kill my poor 486. Another solution was lens flare over the dice's highlights, but I think they are over exploited. I needed a different effect, something more original in computer generated images. The final touch was to add focal blur (my first scene with it ;) ). With the correct position of objects and camera (so perspective is noticeable), the sense of motion was obtained. The dice seem to be frozen in the middle of a bounce and the rest is distorted, like in racing cars' photos. This is a old photographic technique to focus in something. Not original, but different to the main computer images where lens flares are omnipresent. The quality used for the final render was low, because after testing with high quality I estimated that final render will took over seven days (too much for me and my slow PC with its onetasking DOS), so I decided to sacrifice quality and be able to enter the competition (seven days mean that it will end next month, a couple of days beyond deadline). The final picture is (IMO) a strinking one, with few things (only necessary items), where the focus are the two frozen dice in mid-air (this is the _Decisive_ _Moment_). When I re-install Linux and/or get a faster machine I will render at full quality. As is becoming usal in my scenes the aspect ratio is 16/9, which I exploit for the sense of depth and the focal blur. After the render ended, I used Picture Publisher to add the borders and the text. The jpeg was created with PP5 too. Email me if you have any question. =:)