TITLE: A Child's Imagination
NAME: Jason Smith
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: jps6860@yahoo.com
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: js_imagn.jpg
ZIPFILE: js_imagn.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1g

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 3.3, Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0

RENDER TIME: 
    26m 12s

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 600 Mhz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Children can turn anything into something fun to play with.  To an outsider it
may appear to be just a ready to collapse pile of cushions and blocks, but to
the child it is their impregnable fortress.

When I first learned about the topic I knew I had to use a sofa fort and a set
of block I remember from when I was growing up.  My first draft was to just
have those two things in a living room setting.  

My next idea, after I came up with the teddy bear, was to have the bear inside
the cushion fort with some sort of invasion force, tanks or robots, closing in.
 I tinkered around with the invasion force idea for a while.  I did drop the
idea of tanks and robots though since I couldn't see a kid playing with both
them and the bear and blocks.  Instead I used the bear as the enemy and created
people to be the fortress defenders.  The people are based on Fisher Price
Little People toys that I remember playing with around the same age as the
blocks.  

I eventually gave up the invasion force concept and went back to my original
idea of just showing something a child might have built.  I did decide to add
another good fortress building material, the cardboard box.  A few more
additions to make it look like a living room and the scene was done.




DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I created all the objects myself using CSG.  The idea for the bear came from a
similar model by Karl Rudd in the object library at the Moray website
(http://www.stmuc.com/moray).  As I said above the blocks are based on a set I
had growing up, or at least as close as I can remember.  The people are based
on the Fisher Price Little People toys.  The design on the markers is similar
to those on Crayola products.  

I tried to keep the texturing very simple.  An early design used only solid
colors to give it a cartoony feel.  I decided instead to go with the current
look.  Most textures are still only a solid color with a normal applied.  The
cardboard box also has a layer of dirt applied to it.  Two areas of note are
the painting above the sofa and the scribbles on the box.

The painting is actually a photograph that I played around with in PhotoDeluxe
to get the appearance of a painting.  The scribbles are transparent image maps
that are applied to thin cubes that are just above the surface of the box.

The lighting in the scene comes for two area lights placed where the windows in
the room would be.  One window is partially visible at the right of the picture
with a larger window behind the camera.

The zip file contains the Moray scene file and the image maps.  I've also
included the POV-Ray files as they were exported by Moray.


