TITLE: Goban and Wine
TOPIC: Toys & Games

NAME:    David McLeish
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL:   dave@dmcleish.id.au

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.5.0c-10 compiled for Debian
RENDER TIME:   37 hrs 33 min 01 sec
HARDWARE USED: Athlon XP 2100+, 512MB RAM
TOOLS USED:
    POV mode for Emacs
    Java 1.5 beta 2 for fractal tree generator
    Adobe Photoshop for wine label
    CGoban to read SGF files
    GIMP for JPEG conversion


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

I have what would probably be best termed "zeal without knowledge" for both the
game of Go, and wine - a fair amount of enthusiasm for both without really
understanding either very well. This image is my attempt to bring both of them
under control in my own virtual world. :)

The game is the end result of a professional game - see
http://www.go4go.net/english/sgfview.jsp?id=3885. The wine, if you can make out
the label, is from my uncle's winery (http://www.mcleishhunterwines.com.au).

I wanted to create the sense that after the game finished, the players got up
and left everything exactly as it was, perhaps intending to come back and start
another game or clean it up. Or at least finish their wine.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I came back to the IRTC after a few years via helping a friend get started with
POV, and in the process getting to play with the more recent and polished
features like radiosity and photon mapping.

The image puts visual interest ahead of any kind of factual accuracy: the plant
isn't modeled on any particular species; the material for the goban is vaguely
based on kaya but isn't intended to be a perfect image; the stepping stones are
probably too round to make a useful path; and everything is scaled to within a
rough guess of how big it should be.

The basis of the goban and stones was from a project I started a couple of
yearsago when I first learnt to play Go. They're roughly based on the ideal of
a dangerously expensive goban (kaya wood board, slate and clamshell stones).
The white stones have a random clamshell-like pattern on them, which you can
just make out (particularly on the stones in shadow at the bottom of the
scene).

The tree (was originally going to be a bonsai, and is called that in the
source, but I thought it looked too small) was made using a Java program I
threw together. The fractals are fairly unconstrained, so it takes a few goes
to get something good. The branches are made up of cubic spline sphere sweeps.

The mats are also sphere sweeps. Oddly, they were one of the biggest
bottlenecks in rendering, despite having a very simple texture, no reflection
and having a relatively small number of actual objects (although very complex
ones).

The wine bottle and glasses are lathes, and obviously use a fair dose of photon
mapping.

Radiosity provides a lot of the light in this scene - mostly from the sky and
the grass. At one stage the sky was a fairly deep blue, but once I added the
grass it gave the whole thing an eerie blue-green tint, so the sky is now grey,
which ironically makes the scene look much warmer.