TITLE: The Wilde Boar
NAME: Edward Shaw
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: hes3@lycos.com
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: wildebor.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    trueSpace 4.2

TOOLS USED: 
    trueSpace 4.2, Photoshop 5.5, Poser 4

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hours 47 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    400 Mhz Pentium Desktop w/512 MB mem
               SCSI hardrive
               Viper V550 Video Card w/16 MB mem

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I've been told that the connection between "The Wilde Boar" and the idea of
fortress may not 
be as obvious to some others as it is to me, so a word of explanation is
probably a good 
idea, lest I be accused of submitting an entry that is off topic.  I remind the
reader of 
the broad sense in which "fortress" is being applied in this contest, i.e.,
anyplace 
difficult to get into or out of.

Many of those who frequent the tavern environment do so as a way of shutting out
the world 
and the troubles, real or imagined, that it has brought to them.  The tavern
becomes, for 
such people, a fortress which protects them, at least for a time, from the
intrusions of 
those of life's realities which they prefer to avoid.  In a similar sense, it
will sometimes
become a place from which they can escape only with great difficulty.  If the
solace they 
find within those walls is of a nature that they believe is unavailable anywhere
else, they 
can feel themselves powerless to abandon it, even when it ends up being, as is
often the 
case, an agent of the very suffering from which they seek refuge.  My apologies
if this comes 
across as mawkish or maudlin, but there it is. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Creation of this image presented me with numerous obstacles, not the least of
which was the 
fact that I did it using trueSpace4!  I guess many would agree that the most
important 
elements in 3D imagery are lighting and texture.  One challenging aspect of
textures is the 
difficulty of making tiled textures not so obviously tiled.  I encountered this
on the wall 
of "The Wilde Boar."  I started with a "rockwall" JPEG I picked up from
somewhere on the 
internet.  I tried using it as a bump map as well as a texture map, but didn't
like the 
resulting clutter.  Importing the JPEG into Photoshop and then using
high-contrast filtering 
and a bit of manual massaging, I created a new grayscale JPEG that had much less
of the 
information than the original but still lined up perfectly as an overlay.  This,
then, is 
what I used as the bump map in tandem with original JPEG as texture.  In this
way I kept the 
height information while eliminating that clutter. Additionally, I used the
layer 
displacement feature of trueSpace4 to couple the "rockwall" bump map with a
procedural 
called "casting," introducing thereby a randomness to the overall height info on
the wall 
that would have been impossible to achieve using a tiled bump map alone.  In a
similar 
fashion, I used a Photoshop-enhanced grayscale JPEG as a bump map on the door,
again in 
tandem with the original as texture.  
Once I had the basic scene down, I created a dummy block of buildings "across
the street" 
that I moved around until I had shadow patterns I could tolerate.  This, of
course, to 
enhance the apparent depth of the scene.  
One difficulty I had was getting the glass right, particularly on the upstairs
window of the
house next door.  I couldn't use trueSpace glass because it has to be rendered
using ray 
tracing, which for reasons I didn't have time to explore, created the appearance
of 
translucency in my wood!  I ultimately settled on using a simple texture derived
from the 
sky background JPEG that I again massaged first in Photoshop until I got the
look I wanted.
The figure in the foreground was a Poser-created import.  It was at first very
sharply 
outlined all around, in contrast (no pun intended!) to what I desired:  that it
be somewhat 
unobtrusive.  This is an effect I would normally have accomplished in
post-processing using 
Photoshop, but in order to "play by the rules," I instead used some trueSpace
"negative 
lights" and, by changing their positions and intensity, was able to more
smoothly blend 
the figure with the background.    



