EMAIL: firefly-mail@gmx.net
NAME: Martin Dickopp
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Timbered House
COUNTRY: Germany
RENDERER USED: Blender 2.26
TOOLS USED: Gimp (image map/heightfield creation), cjpeg (Targa -> JPEG conversion)
RENDER TIME: 7 minutes 45 seconds
HARDWARE USED: Pentium PC, 166 MHz, 64 MB RAM running GNU/Linux
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A timbered house.

I created this image to teach myself Blender.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The house has been constructed of simple mesh objects, mostly cubes. I have
used Blender's "number menu" a lot to place the cubes exactly at the
coordinates where I wanted them to be.

The hill is a mesh created from a heightfield. The red path in an image map.
The grass is a static particle system. It is based on a duplicate of the
hill with a higher number of vertices. Since the memory requirements for
this object caused Blender to run significantly slower on my system, I
removed some parts of the mesh which are behind the house from the camera's
point of view.

The flowers are exactly identical except for the color. They are composed of
meshes, created by spending hours of manually moving lots of vertices
around. :)

I'm mostly dissatisfied with the windows. I wanted to use enironment maps
for reflections, but I couldn't figure out how to set the texture
coordinates so that the result isn't severely distorted. Finally I gave up
and used a simple cloud texture.