TITLE: And Now For a Word NAME: Chip Richards COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: chipr@niestu.com WEBPAGE: http://www.niestu.com/ TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: crnword.jpg ZIPFILE: crnword.zip RENDERER USED: rendrib TOOLS USED: BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools), The GIMP, xv, font3d, perl, gforge, sced RENDER TIME: 4228 seconds (1 10 28) HARDWARE USED: Intel Pentium Pro 200, 64mb RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I love the arts, and I love entertainment. I also love movies and television. I regret the fact that those media are often used to serve commerce at the expense of art. And it seems to me that the trend is increasing. Don't think that I am an enemy of capitalism--I like making money as much as the next person, and I think others have the right to make money too. But there's a line between selling and smelling, and corporations cross it more and more often. This image shows what such excess looks like to me: cheap and ugly, like bad graffiti. Sorry to be so grim and preachy, but once this idea lodged in my head, I couldn't shake it until I rendered it. I have nothing against most of the companies whose trademarks I've used, shamelessly and without permission. I doubt it would have been granted even if I'd asked, given the unflattering use. They'll probably send their legal wolves to tear me apart. Nice knowing you. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: As always, there's lots more I wanted to do with this image, but ignorance and lack of time prevented it. I learned a lot about RenderMan, but still have an incredible amount left to learn. I wrote my own perl binding to BMRT's libribout, months before Glenn Lewis announced his, so my syntax is somewhat different from his. I've included the perl script anyway; if anyone thinks my binding would be worth releasing, now that Glenn has published his very nice one, write me and we'll talk. I've also included the complete RIB files, so you don't need to run the script to re-render the image. RenderMan is a very powerful environment, a programmer's dream. I can't say enough good things about BMRT and RenderMan. Anyone who has ever wished POV had real arrays, or subroutines, or string manipulation, or whatever, should definitely look into RenderMan. The inadequacies of this image reflect my own shortcomings, not those of my tools. I made the letters with font3d, the hillside texture with gforge, the support racks with sced, and the logos with the GIMP. I had to use a different font for the "W" since the one in the "Monotone" font didn't match the real sign. (Not that the rest of the image matches the real sign very well, either, sigh.) I also had to doctor the landscape image map with the GIMP, since the original was unusably smooth. Now it's just embarrassingly smooth. I laid the scene out by hand, and wrote a lot of little test scripts to check out various behaviors of the renderer, shaders, etc. Biggest Disappointment: The ground. RenderMan doesn't really support height fields, but its displacement shaders more than make up for it. Despite all the power of the rendering environment, I was unable to produce a convincing terrain. I'm sure I'll learn how eventually. I also had plans to add rocks and bushes to the hillside, but procrastinated too long and missed out. Biggest Waste of Time: The supports behind the letters. They're really a minor detail, and add very little to the scene. They took forever to model, despite being very simple shapes. I never did get them shaded and textured the way I wanted, and they look awful despite taking almost a full day to produce. Sigh. Once I got started on them, I couldn't seem to stop working on them until they were finished. Biggest Thrill: Learning twice as much about shaders as I knew before. I "wrote" only two shaders for this image. It's not fair to say that I wrote them, since they are essentially cut-and-pasted from other publicly available shaders. I've included their sources anyway; the other shaders I used are available on the net. It was a great learning experience just finding out how to use the great shaders that others have written. Someday I'll start writing my own original (perhaps even useful) shaders. Most Fun: Turning all those logos into spray-painted versions. I've looked at them for so long now, I'm not sure how well my idea comes across. But it was a blast making them. I wanted a few more logos, but didn't get around to drawing them. I don't enter the competition to win, but to learn. As always, I have accomplished my goal.