TITLE: lost_childhood NAME: Mark Zambelli COUNTRY: England EMAIL: mark@zambelli.fsnet.co.uk WEBPAGE: http://www.squirreltape.btinternet.co.uk TOPIC: Dreaming COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: lost_chi.jpg RENDERER USED: Bryce5 TOOLS USED: Photoshop (bitmap textures), Wings3D (modelling), Poser3, Ultra Fractal (textures), Bryce5 (modelling, texture creation and scene assembly), Form*Z (manipulation of poser figure), Cinema4D se (wires and cables). RENDER TIME: 23 hours 37 minutes (1024x768 @72dpi) HARDWARE USED: PIII 700Mhz with 640 Mb RAM, ATI rage 32Mb Graphics card, 15Gb Hard Drive. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I have always been fascinated by the subject of artificial life and thought in general so I wanted to have some fun depicting just what would an artificial consciousness dream about (if this ever becomes fact not fiction) so I geared the picture towards an up-beat (if slightly sad) theme. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I modelled the female robot figure in Poser (paying care to make sure she seemed asleep but strangley preoccupied) and imported this into Form*Z where I started boolean-ing around with it to create a limbless-headed torso. I extruded some shapes for the endo-skeleton, ribcage compartment and spinal assembly and exported this manipulated figure directly to Bryce5. I then used Wings3D to model the TV display, the 'dream-chamber' device (both the lower and upper(dream-reading) parts), the power transformers, the quadrapod uplink device (the little pod sat in the hole), the power modules and the plasma canisters (dotted around the floor), the observation booth above the door and finally the Door. All these models I then exported to Bryce5 and applied various procedural (mostly metallic) textures and custom made bitmap textures (the various computer displays and panels). I positioned all the objects in the scene and added some primitives for the raised flooring, a scaled up sphere for the walls of the room and a sphere for the 'mind recording' electric bubble above the sleeping robots head. I then swept circles along various path object splines within Cinema4D SE to create the wiring and cables that would connect all the machinery together, exporting them as .obj files to be imported in Bryce5. I then created a custom lighting rig comprising 144 point-lights set very low intensity arranged in a squashed dome and placed this rig up near the ceiling in an attempt to re-create a faked Global Illumination effect (at the cost of render time). The next scene that had to be set up and modelled from scratch was the Dream itself which is displayed on the TV screen. This was a scene made of a terrain and 2 trees positioned and textured to give the impression of a kind-of summer meadow. I modelled a swing and 5 butterflies (which are covered with fractal images of various mandelbrot sets (paying homage to Terry Pratchet's chaos butterfly in his book 'interesting times'). Next came the little girl so I modelled a running child in Poser and imported this to my meadow scene. After seeting up this new scene I rendered it out at 640x480 and took it into photoshop to add the girls dress, hair and headband which I hand painted (I also added some grass to be silhouetted against the sky). After saving, this was then ready to be used as the texture for the main display depicting the robots dream. If anyone would like the source file and bitmaps,psd or jpg's that went into making this scene then drop me a line and we can work something out on cd-r. The file is 32 MB and I only have 56K modem along with most of us in this country (rats)