TITLE: Fortresses of the Mind

NAME: Michael Lewis & Luke Nakatsukasa
COUNTRY: United States of America

EMAIL: mlewis@esdevel.com
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mindfort.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1 for MSDOS

TOOLS USED: 
    Moray 2.5b.wat for MSDOS
            TTF2UDO (for text on poster)
            MSPaint for windows (for height maps on the hair)
            Microsoft Image Composer v1.0 (for TGA->JPG conversion)


RENDER TIME: 
    50 min 29 sec
CREATION TIME: total about 30 hours


HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 133/64MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

One thing to get out of the way -- the comments from last contest's text
file were admittedly unneccessary. Apologies to those concerned. I am a
rather opinionated and sometimes stuck up guy; but nobody's perfect. Now,
on to raytracing.

In a peculiar sort of way, this guy's brain is a fortress--extremely hard
to get inside of. I guess that's what the point of this scene is; there's
a weird, half-insane computer nerd that's so far gone from the normal realm
of the human race that nobody quite understands him. He has built himself a
fortress -- on purpose or unwittingly -- and he can no longer be reached or
accessed by "outsiders."

I chose to do a computer techie because A) I can very easily identify with
him. B) I had plenty of trash sitting around my desk to model the scene
with. C) its kind of ironic. I'm a lot like this guy.

One last note, that is the reason behind the fact that there is no source
provided for this scene, which is against my normal principles. It's actually
also the reason that some of the modeling is pretty pathetic. What happened
was I started this scene at the beginning of the competition and had prototype
objects filling all of the gaps where real things needed to appear later; some
of the objects were already in place. However, I got stuck with school work
and ended up having one afternoon before the deadline to finish things; there
fore there is a lot of "cheating" going on. I didn't feel like submitting the
source for two reasons, number one it totals at about 3.5 MB and that's a bit
much, number two I didn't feel like revealing just how much "cheating" I did.
Pretty much its things like the guy's head is turned so I didn't have to do
a face; his arm is in his lap and therefore concealed from the camera; the
fingers on his visible hand are partially hidden and in a dimly lit area to
conceal the rotten modeling there; the cans are only half way modeled (just
the tops); and there are dozens more "fudges" I did to speed things up. It
shouldn't take a rocket scientist with a supercomputer to see all of the
little things like that as well as the half-modeled stuff (esp. the bed, ugh!)

Anyway. That's it.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Once again, I owe the cool ideas to Luke. (Thanks also to my parents who
provided me with plenty of Coke and tolerated my loud music at 1 A.M.)

There are six basic groups of objects in this scene:
1) the computer
2) the trash/cans/etc
3) the poster
4) the guy and his chair
5) the bed and stereo
6) the hut thing that he's inside of

THE COMPUTER
The monitor is made of a few cubes and a prism object. The screen is
actually a shot of my Desktop. The mouse is a basic prism. The keyboard
is in two parts; these are the base (a prism) and the keys (cubes) The
CPU is the most complex; the actual case is two superquadrics, the drives
are mostly simple objects cut up with CSG, and the weird design on the
bottom half (modeled after my own CPU) is done with some complicated CSG
setups.

THE TRASH AND STUFF
The paper is all bezier patches with a wierd texture. The book is a
pair of prism objects. The cans are CSG'd cylinders or bezier patches
(for the crumpled one)

THE POSTER
A cube with image map. The image was created with PovRay and TTF2UDO.
The blue thing holding it to the wall is supposed to be a pushpin, but
its too small to tell really. It was created with a lathe object.

THE GUY AND HIS CHAIR
The chair legs are cubes. The seat is a superquadric. Simple.

The computer nerd was a real challenge. The shoe is done with a few
basic shapes, some prisms, and a lathe object. The sock on the shoe
foot is just a cylinder. The sock on the other foot was done with a
bezier patch and a couple cylinders/spheres. The legs are a wierd lathe
object with some cylinder/sphere enhancements. The shorts are done
with a set of cylinders and a bezier curve or two; the shirt is a
bezier patch. The neck is a lathe with some cylinders and spheres for
the details. His head was the biggest challenge; the skull is a bezier
patch and a lathe put together, the earphones are a lathe and a prism.
This leaves the
hair; the most interesting part. This was done with a set of height
fields and a speckled image made with Paint; the height fields, when
transformed properly, will intersect to form the bushy clumps of spiked
hair. The arms were also tricky; they are modeled with the same type
of objects as everything else, but the fingers are almost exclusively
spheres.

The wire trailing from the headphones is about 30 cylinders all oriented
into that curve shape and scaled to look smooth.

THE BED AND STEREO
The bed is modeled with cylinders, torii, and cubes. The sheets are
actually a cube with the "wrinkles" normal applied. The pillow is a
superquadric. (The bed looks a lot like mine...)

The stereo is (sort of) similar to one near my computer; the object
was modeled with prisms, cylinders, and cubes. The wire mesh effect was
done with cylinders and a checkered texture that is one square black,
one square clear, etc.

THE HUT
Its supposed to be a quonset hut, but the effect is sort of lost due
to the fact that most of it's not visible. Its actually a lathe object
with a plane used as the floor.

TEXTURES
There's a lot of textures in here, mostly for modeling all of the
different types of materials in the room. These were created mostly by
trial and error.

All of the lights on the monitor/CPU are just smooth pigments.
The plasticish texture on the computer parts is just a solid beige color
with a lot of small dents. The wood textures are pretty much stock with
some changes applied to the normals and the mapping patterns. The stereo
texture (blackish) is just that -- a black map with a medium ambient value
for the shiny look. The bedframe texture is just a highly turbulent map with
some dents applied. The tin/metal textures are all derived from the POVRay
SilverMetal texture with a modified normal and some edited finish effects.
The floor is a bozo map with some dirt-like colors. The drink cans are just
agate textures with a medium turbulence values. All of the paper sheets are
a two layered texture with a wrinkly paper like layer underneath a swirled
black to transparent gradient that gives the smeared, printed effect.
The cloth textures are pretty simple, just solid colors with small wrinkles
applied.


 gasp! 

