TITLE: Prison of Glas

NAME: Nils G Olsson
COUNTRY: Sweden

EMAIL: nils.olsson@telia.com
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: prison_o.jpg
ZIPFILE: prison_o.zip
RENDERER USED: 

Carrara 1.01


TOOLS USED: 

Carrara 1.01, PhotoShop 6.0


RENDER TIME: 

35 min

WORKING TIME:
Modeling = 12 hours
Assembly = 3 hours


HARDWARE USED: 

Xeon III 2x800 MHz w/ 1024 Mb, Elsa Gloria 2 Pro, 
EIZO Flexscan T961 and a logitech mouse.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

The feeling I want to convey with this picture is that of perspective. 
What may seem an ordinary glas, can in the world of this bug be an 
invinsible prison. A fortress can be many things, and is often only
defined by your own point of view.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This scene was created entrirely in Carrara, using Splines, Metaballs and
Mesh editing. Using some built in functions such as Premodeled Splines to
start off with (such as for the glas). 

The main scene consists of eight objects:
A Glas, a Bug, an El. cord, a Cardboardbox, a Hammer, a Wrench and a
Screwdriver.
A difficult part of this scene was some of the modeling, the coke bottle was a
pain to get the glas to look right with coke in it. Some of the finer elements
can not be seen in the render, such as the ribs on the thumbscrew on the wrench.


Besides these main objects there are quite a few objects only used for
an environmental effect. a ceiling made from aluminiumplates, white fluorescent

tubes in the ceiling giving a good light reflection and a couple of objects 
thrown in for a random real world feeling, such as the apple visible only in
the reflections of the bottle and the glas. The reason to why I didn't just use
reflection maps is that if you use reflection maps when several of your objects
are reflective, the scene tends to go stiff and loose out on dynamics.

The lightning af the scene is composed of ten omni lights, placed to give an
illusion of radiosity (grey/beige lights from below to simulate the light
emissioning from the floor etc.). The main lighting comes from an RGB-spot
(ie three independent spotlight with Red, Green and blue colour respectivly 
placed in almost the same place with the same direction, this gives much
more depth and "real" light feeling). Finally there is one distant directional
light to simulate the main light source I want to convey. The lights are
mixed raytraced and shadowmapped lights. And as always the most difficult
part of creating a scene is to get the lighting just right, not too hard and
not
too soft. Getting lighting too hard is usually a beginners problem, but getting
the lights too soft often occurs when you over-rely on radiosity.

The textures were all hand drawn in Photoshop and imported into Carrara. 

All in all I would like to recommend Carrara, an inexpensive but yet very
powerful 
modeling and rendering package. It is to my knowledge the most competent
modeler/renderer for the price ($500) and sports the absolutely most gorgeous
interface
in the world. The program was formerly owned by MetaCreations, but is nowadays
owned and distributed by Eovia (www.eovia.com)

Gamma correction, Image cutting and JPEG-conversion was done in Photoshop.



If you have any comments or wish to ask any questions please write my e-mail
adress.


Brgds

Nils G Olsson