TITLE: And Now For a Word
NAME: Chip Richards
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: chipr@niestu.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.niestu.com/
TOPIC: Arts & Entertainment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: crnword.jpg
ZIPFILE: crnword.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    rendrib

TOOLS USED: 
    BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools), The GIMP, xv, font3d, perl,
            gforge, sced

RENDER TIME: 
    4228 seconds (1 10 28)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Pentium Pro 200, 64mb RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I love the arts, and I love entertainment.  I also love movies and
television.  I regret the fact that those media are often used to serve
commerce at the expense of art.  And it seems to me that the trend is
increasing.

Don't think that I am an enemy of capitalism--I like making money as much as
the next person, and I think others have the right to make money too.  But
there's a line between selling and smelling, and corporations cross it more
and more often.  This image shows what such excess looks like to me: cheap and
ugly, like bad graffiti.

Sorry to be so grim and preachy, but once this idea lodged in my head, I
couldn't shake it until I rendered it.  I have nothing against most of the
companies whose trademarks I've used, shamelessly and without permission.  I
doubt it would have been granted even if I'd asked, given the unflattering
use.  They'll probably send their legal wolves to tear me apart.

Nice knowing you. <grin>



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


As always, there's lots more I wanted to do with this image, but ignorance and
lack of time prevented it.  I learned a lot about RenderMan, but still have an
incredible amount left to learn.  I wrote my own perl binding to BMRT's
libribout, months before Glenn Lewis announced his, so my syntax is somewhat
different from his.  I've included the perl script anyway; if anyone thinks my
binding would be worth releasing, now that Glenn has published his very nice
one, write me and we'll talk.  I've also included the complete RIB files, so
you don't need to run the script to re-render the image.

RenderMan is a very powerful environment, a programmer's dream.  I can't say
enough good things about BMRT and RenderMan.  Anyone who has ever wished POV
had real arrays, or subroutines, or string manipulation, or whatever, should
definitely look into RenderMan.  The inadequacies of this image reflect my own
shortcomings, not those of my tools.

I made the letters with font3d, the hillside texture with gforge, the support
racks with sced, and the logos with the GIMP.  I had to use a different font
for the "W" since the one in the "Monotone" font didn't match the real sign.
(Not that the rest of the image matches the real sign very well, either,
sigh.)  I also had to doctor the landscape image map with the GIMP, since the
original was unusably smooth.  Now it's just embarrassingly smooth.  I laid
the scene out by hand, and wrote a lot of little test scripts to check out
various behaviors of the renderer, shaders, etc.

Biggest Disappointment:  The ground.  RenderMan doesn't really support height
fields, but its displacement shaders more than make up for it.  Despite all
the power of the rendering environment, I was unable to produce a convincing
terrain.  I'm sure I'll learn how eventually.  I also had plans to add rocks
and bushes to the hillside, but procrastinated too long and missed out.

Biggest Waste of Time:  The supports behind the letters.  They're really a
minor detail, and add very little to the scene.  They took forever to model,
despite being very simple shapes.  I never did get them shaded and textured
the way I wanted, and they look awful despite taking almost a full day to
produce.  Sigh.  Once I got started on them, I couldn't seem to stop working
on them until they were finished.

Biggest Thrill: Learning twice as much about shaders as I knew before.  I
"wrote" only two shaders for this image.  It's not fair to say that I wrote
them, since they are essentially cut-and-pasted from other publicly available
shaders.  I've included their sources anyway; the other shaders I used are
available on the net.  It was a great learning experience just finding out how
to use the great shaders that others have written.  Someday I'll start writing
my own original (perhaps even useful) shaders.

Most Fun:  Turning all those logos into spray-painted versions.  I've looked
at them for so long now, I'm not sure how well my idea comes across.  But it
was a blast making them.  I wanted a few more logos, but didn't get around to
drawing them.

I don't enter the competition to win, but to learn.  As always, I have
accomplished my goal. <g>

