TITLE: Wet NAME: Stephen M. Farrell COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: StephenF@whoever.com WEBPAGE: n/a TOPIC: Dreaming COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: smfwet.jpg RENDERER USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.5 beta TOOLS USED: POV-Ray for Windows 3.5 beta; Paint Shop Pro 6.02 (signature and jpg compression only) RENDER TIME: 6 hr 49 min HARDWARE USED: 1.4 GHz Thunderbird; 512 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A computer artist takes a break from his latest creation and stretches out on the floor to play his favorite computer game. Before long, he falls asleep, and dreams of his favorite computer game heroine. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First of all, I'd like to make it quite clear that Lara Croft is a registered trademark of Core Design, Ltd. Once again, I find myself having created a scene with no intention of doing so. Since I moved to a new apartment in mid-May, and had no time to render for the first month of this round, I decided to take this round off. As you can see, it didn't quite work out that way. I started playing around with rendering the new computer desk I bought, then added a room to fill out the scene. Then just for fun I decided to try adding a person, and it occured to me that if I stretched him out on the floor, I could have him dreaming of his dream woman. At first, it was just going to be a generic fantasy woman, but I started thinking about what kind of woman this guy would be dreaming about, and an image of Lara Croft popped into my head as being the ultimate computer geek fantasy. So there you have it. Okay, now for the technical stuff. With the obvious exception of the people, almost everything in the scene is CSG. The various cords were done using sphere_sweeps, and the lamp base is a lathe. The painting is an image_map of my entry to the Fortress round, and the frame was taken as is from my entry to the Worlds Within Worlds round. The monitor display is a screenshot I took of my desktop, using a wallpaper I created and an unfinished project for the scene being rendered. The pillow is made of blobs, and looks pretty horrible... I just couldn't seem to get anything good in the time I had available. The people are blob objects. I used the man from my entry to the Worship round to start, but put in a lot of work getting it to look the way it does here. Since the man's legs were hidden behind the altar in the original scene, I had never actually given him legs, so I had to create them from scratch here. Repositioning the arms and hands was a lot of work, as it involves moving around lots of small spherical blob components through trial and error until I get something that looks okay. I also reworked most of the facial features to try to get them to look better, especially the ears (which still don't look great, but look better than they did originally). Then I tried to create clothes, using the technique of scaling down the blob threshold value slightly, combined with increasing the radius of each individual component. It still doesn't look anywhere near as good as I would like, but gives the impression of clothes, at least. The shoes are blob objects as well, and use the sphere_sweep object for the laces. As for Lara, I took the man and with a lot of tweaking, turned him into a woman. Added breasts, narrowed the waist and upper body, repositioned the arms, reshaped the legs slightly, redid the facial features yet again, added hair and accessories (glasses, guns, holsters, etc), and redid the clothing. I think her clothing turned out a little better than his jeans did. All in all, about 75% of the time spent on this scene involved reworking the figures and creating the clothing. I'm still trying to get the hang of radiosity... my settings seem to work pretty well here, but there is some obvious artifacting that I was unable to get rid of. I tried tweaking the settings, using the tips in the docs, but to no avail. Still, it definitely appears better lit with the radiosity than it does without, so I guess that's a start. Well, guess that's it for this round. Looking forward to hearing your comments/criticisms... they're definitely appreciated!