RJG-Dream: Li'l Dreamer

Robbert de Groot
http://www3.telus.net/robbert 
Copyright 2002 Robbert de Groot.

IRTC stills entry for 30th June.  Topic was Dreaming.

Description:

A simple image.  I wanted to enter something into previous rounds but never had the time to get something done in time.  Even this entry I started late.  Two weekes before deadline in fact.  This is mainly because I wasn't paying attention to the IRTC.  So when I did, and saw the topic, Dreaming, I had an idea.  An idea that I though I could pull off pretty well.  I'm no expert with raytracing, 3D modelling or whatnot but I think the results are A'Ok with me.  Granted I'm not entirely happy with it.  I can see some flaws like...

1. The kid looks like he's floating.
2. The kid looks pretty down.  Didn't really want the kid to look that depressed but oh well.
3. The water wasn't exactly what I initially had in mind.  I had hoped that the DNA strand would be duplicatable but I couldn't get it to look right.  What to do, what to do.  Put water/liquid down there.  Looks ok.  An ok compromise.  Gives an idea of origin.  Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a cop out. 
4. The atoms aren't the greatest.  I was trying to use media but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why it wasn't coming out as it was shown in Moray.  So I used a substitute that works ok and that is to use a disk with an onion texture.  I got that idea from Chris Colfax's Galaxy include files.  Works well but you can seel an artifact of that on one of the atoms intersecting with the liquid.  After the render though I figured out why media wasn't working.  I forgot the hollow keyword.  Arg!  I've hit that more than once but I've been out of povray use for quite some time.  Apparently I'm not the only one who gets bitten by this.  Live and learn.  I'll remember next time.

Before getting into what I did to make this I should...

Thanks!: (no particular order)

POV-Ray:
http://www.povray.org/
POV-Ray ray tracer.

Galaxy Includes: Chris Colfax.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/
Used for the backdrop and giving me the idea to use a disk for the atoms to get me past a hurdle that was causing me grief.

Hamapatch: Hamakazu.
http://www.geocities.com/hamapatch/program/index.html
The kid in the image was all done in hamapatch. This was the first time using hamapatch.  I used spatch before but this was quite an improvement.  

Moray:Lutz + Kretzschmar GbR.
http://www.stmuc.com/moray/
Used this to work on the textures used in the image.  I use it for other things but for this image, just textures.

Department of Chemistry, Georgia State University.
http://chemistry.gsu.edu/glactone/PDB/DNA_RNA/dna.html
The DNA molecule PDB file.

PaintShop Pro: JASC.
http://www.jasc.com/
Image editting and manipulation.

The Image:

The image can be split up into 3 parts.  The kid, the background and the dna. 

The Kid:

I did him first.  This was mainly to see if I could actually do what I wanted to do and this would prove to be the most difficult part of the image.  I've never tried Hamapatch before now but I have used spatch and was hoping it worked the same.  It is close.  I just needed to know how to weld points and to play around with it to figure it all out.  The only annoyance I found with the program was that the hot keys were all wrong.  I probably had to configure them or something but the defaults were just bizarre.  'R' to scale?  Anyway, I worked around it.

The pj's is what I worked on first.  It was easier.  Started from the bottom up.  One leg first then copy and flip to make the other leg.  When it was all done I was left with the face.  The face in the final is just the face.  There is no back end to it.  I initially started to model something really realistic.  That proved to be way too difficult.  And in afterthought would have looked out of place with the cartooney pjs (in my opinion.)  So then I went with the other extreme and made something really toy like and simple.  First pass was with completely black eyes.  Looked sort of demonic I thought.  So I put white and pupils in the eyes.  It didn't look demonic but it didn't look good either.  Eyelids didn't help at all.  So I chucked that idea.  What the hey, go anime.  Or try to.  Somwhat simpler.  I'm still not completely happy with it but then, you can tweak it all to death.  There's got to be a time you say, that's it, and move on.  I'm not happy with the eye lashes or the brows.  The eyes don't look too well defined in the final image either. 

All in all not too shabby for my first attempt at hamapatch.  Learned a few tricks that I can use next time when using the program that will certainly save some grief.

The DNA:

I did this next.  Mainly because I was worried that I couldn't find a model of the DNA.  I found the POVCHEM program and it showed the DNA strand and all.  Downloaded the program.  Nice program.  No DNA PDB though.  Hunted the PDB file down.  Looked at it in POVCHEM.  Very nice program.  Unfortunately it requires registration and I didn't feel comfortable using it's output for the competition as I won't use this program for anything else.  Thankfully the PDB file is ASCII and any good text editor with macro capability can easily convert this file to a pov script pretty easily.  So that's what I did.  It ended up giving me more flexibility, or at least I think so.  Mind you if I had to do this time and time again, I would seriously use POVCHEM.  Once the script was in place then it was a matter of tweaking the objects to place at the atom locations.

The Background:

I knew I wanted something that looked like a portal to a universe behind the kid.  I've seen Galaxy images from the galaxy include file.  The only problem is that I couldn't exactly do what I wanted with a few geometry CSGs and the galaxy includes.  So I had to make an image and use the image of the galaxy as a texture map.  I couldn't figure out anyother way to do it.  It looks ok though and whenever it comes to engineering/programming, sometimes it's best to keep things simple.  So I used a separate POV file to create the galaxy.png file.  The PNG file size I used was 1024x768 (yes landscape).  I rotated it in PaintShop Pro.  Not included with this archive.  It should be easy enough to regenerate from the GALAXY.POV script. 

The objects of the background were calculated from a dither pattern that I created in PainShop Pro.  Using a 25% 8 bit gray 500x500 pixel image which I reduced to 2 colour using one of the error diffusion dither options.  Saved the image to a RAW file which is basically RGB pixel values.  Wrote a small program to read this raw image and to write out a POV Script that puts an object where there is a black pixel.  This POV Script file will break down the objects into rows so that I can change the scale of the items in the rows per row. 

Now to get the galaxy image onto the lozenges I just needed to subtract a box which is texture mapped with the galaxy image to have the galaxy image appear on the lozenges.  Initially I intended the lozenges to be like bubbles but that showed too much of the liquid in behind.  I didn't want that area too bright.  You can still see some of the liquid back there which I'm not sure I'm happy or unhappy with.  It does give some definition to the lozenges but my initial idea was that it should be pretty dark back there.  The liquid wasn't intended to be back there anyway so that sort of threw a loop into the equation.  I'll live with it.  It's not bad.  I'll be better next time.

The Texturing:

I used Moray to do this which was so nice as I probably wouldn't have been able to find the textures I wanted as quick.  The texture on the face didn't turn out as well as I hoped.  Hopefully the kid doesn't looked too diseased.  I do like the PJ texture.  Looks nice and cuddly.  Pooki is ok.  I wanted something that looks like fabric.  Looks ok.  He could have been a little brighter.  The eyes were a texture map.  I though the blue in the eyes would have been more pronounced and that there would be maybe a sparkle in the eyes.  I thought of drawing in the sparkle to the eyes but that would just look bad in a raytraced environment.  Ah well, a hazzard fro using flat Anime eyes.  The lozenges and the liquid uses a chrome texture with ambient off and diffuse full.  The atoms are semi transparent with the disks inside extra bright so that they shine through the skin of the sphere that they are contained in.  The disk uses the onion texture.  The galaxy texture has an ambient of full and diffuse off.  This is so that there will be no shadows on it.  It's suppose to be a portal to another universe not a wall with an image stuck to it.

Lighting:

Final lighting used 32 lights.  This may have been over kill but hey,  Had to see what would happen.  I like the effect though. 

Rendering:

Options used.  Antialiasing yes, threshold .3 and depth 5.  5 might have been over kill again but what the hey.

Total time: 1 day 20 hours.  Ouch.

A couple of things probably contributed to the slowness.  The background, initially I subtracted the box from the union of all the lozenges.  I thought this would be way quicker.  It's not.  I later changed it to substract the box from each row of lozenges.  This worked soo much faster.  I didn't try but I would guess that substracting the box from each individual lozenge would have been faster still.  Something to remember for the future.  I don't know if the atoms would have rendered any faster if I had used media over the disc solution.  Maybe someone could tell me.  The number of lights certainly didn't help nor did the 5x5 antialiasing.  3x3 probably would have been sufficient.