TITLE: Toy train
NAME: Stefan Persson
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: azynkron@hotmail.com
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: toy_trai.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Brazil 1.2.52

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio MAX 7

RENDER TIME: 
    5 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    ACER TravelMate 2601WLM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Minimalism.. hmm.. I found that to be a harder topic than I thought at first. I
made several pictures with various "simple  things in a simple environment". I
read somewhere that Minimalism can be described as the result should reflect
the process of the creation in that sense that you should accomplish as much as
you could with the minimal effort. With traditional media, a canvas i.e., many
artists wanted the pure creational force to be seen in the image. 

After abandoning several ideas I had a flash back from an occasion when I was in
Argentina. I was a in a shanty town part of Buenos Aires and my eyes suddenly
caught sight of a small toy that some of the kids were playing with. It was
just a piece of wood with several metal wires and a tin can attaced on the top.
The weels were made of some old thread spools. I suppose to most kids here it
would be just a piece of junk, but to them it was a train or a car that in
their imagination were made of shiny metal. And as I was thinking about it, I
interpreted the toy as a minimalistic creation that not only were very simple
in the design but also in appearance. 

The rest were left to your imagination.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Pretty straight forward use of splines for the can, nails, the metal wire and
the spools. The main part of the toy is a box with a noise displacement. The
dents in the can are hand made from pushing around some vertices with soft
selection after I applied the lathe. The thing rests safe on a very strong
plane. 

I was tempted for a while to enhance the model with more stuff, but I decided to
not to do so.

Ofcourse, the plane and the main piece of wood has UV-mapped bitmaps but the
rest are as a matter of fact procedural shaders from the wood to the rusty
iron.

I didn't use any GI or radiosity as the rendertimes became hilarious. I don't
know exactly why, but I suspect it had something to do with the procedural
shaders I used. Instead I used the "3-spot-technique". I also wanted to try
Brazil as a renderer since I've used VRay alot. They are a bit different from
eachother and I found that VRay is much more forgiving when it comes to
lightning for instance. I also stuck to the rather sharp shadows, as I found
that when I took them away the model started to float.

The image was then mounted on a white background in Photoshop and the text was
added.