TITLE: Rigged Game NAME: Thorsten Thielen COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: thth@c2226.de WEBPAGE: http://www.c2226.de TOPIC: Minimalism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: ththgame.jpg ZIPFILE: ththgame.zip RENDERER USED: Povray 3.50c-10 (from Kubuntu Linux 5.04) TOOLS USED: My trusty FTE programmers' editor and whatever imagination I could spare :-) GIMP for conversion to JPEG. RENDER TIME: 9.5 hours ( hours without focal blur) HARDWARE USED: Pentium IV 2.8 GHz, 2G RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: You may be the asketic of asketics, you may live from air and love alone, but there still are some things that you can't just do away with if you still want to be part of the game. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image for the "Minimalism" topic is my first submission to the Internet Ray Tracing Competition. I tried to create something that matches the topic both in style as well as in motive; as a result on the one hand the topic suited my style of working rather good - on the other hand I found it rather hard to come up with something that did reflect some sense of "minimal" but still was interesting enough on the visual side. As I still haven't found a modeller that I really like, I do all the object modelling, placing, etc. simply "by hand" and use Povray for all previews (and of course for the final rendering too ;-). This scene features a number of models created by using rather simple CSG modelling without any "advanced" features at all. I managed to get away with only two textures, a plain black and a white one, and two light sources. I tried to work with the same elements (white smoothly rounded main bodies with black smaller cutouts) and everything roughly in the same scale as far as possible to cut down on the complexity. Using only so few elements first did lead to a somehow boring visual impression though, so I tried using other things to give it a little more appeal: I added a small amount of specular highlight and reflection to the textures so the resulting effects add to the visual complexity of the scene without actually adding some new elements otherwise. As one exception from the general rule I added a normal (a crackle pattern scaled very small, which gives a rather interesting look IMHO) to the plane that all the other objects sit on. I also slightly tinted the light sources in the blue direction to add at least a little color to the picture. The shadows that are thrown also make the image look not quite so plain, especially when the light sources are done as area_lights. To reduce the plainness of the image even more I tried using some focal blur (first time ever :-). Everything used in this scene (models, textures, etc.) was created by me from scratch specially for this image. Total time I worked on this image until I started the final rendering (including some time for doing test renderings - in far too good quality - I simply can't wait to see the stuff :-) was about 22 hours.