TITLE: Just how fast is a calculator +3, anyways?
NAME: Matthew Hilliard
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: matt.hilliard@ualberta.net
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: enefinal.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    blender 2.20

TOOLS USED: 
    Gimp for texture creation on paper textures, blender for everything
else :)

RENDER TIME: 
    32 minutes, 2 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 3-800 w/ 512 MB

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Ever play (A)D&D?  I did a couple times a few years back, and I got a chuckle
from the idea of monsters playing Engineers and Escalators, while lying in bed
one night.

Its dark.  Number one peice of feedback I got while making it.  If you've ever
been in someone's basement playing D&D, you probably will feel the same as I
do--its entirely too bright.  Can't please everyone, but I got the lighting to
where most of my guinea pigs were happy.
Anyhow, it turns out that at the final vantage and resolution, you can't read
the title on the book "Marketing Handbook," though it is quite legible from
other points of view and higher resolutions.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

First off, everything here is created by me, except the stone floor and wall
textures which I aquired a few years back, and have forgotten where.  My
apologies to whomever they belong to.
Thanks to everone on #blender3d and blender.nl newsserver who provided feedback,
you know who you are.
I started with a mesh table (aka box) and some points of light for the candles. 
Created a rapid protoype for each monster, and the screen just to get some idea
of placement.
Added the slime and stool.  The slime is a collection of metaballs, it seemed to
be the best way in case I wanted to change it's position or make it biggeer or
smaller, or oozier.
The ghost was a character I modelled last hallowe'en, although back then it has
a pumpkin on its shoulders.  Pure mesh.  Altered the mesh a bit and created a
head, and went for a transparent/emtting look on the material.  (Motion blur
was an afterthought, I got a suggestion for more of a glow, but I recalled
something about ghosts blurring and thought I'd do that instead.  The blur
extened the render time from 7 mintes to more than 30)
At this point I dropped a number of blue lamps into the scene.
After I finished the ghost, blender 2.20 was released with a new skeleton
deformation system, and I used both the cyclops and dragon as an excuse to test
the system out and the "somewhat less recent" subdivision surfaces.
The cyclops was first, and the entire cyclops model, pose and texturing took
only 3 hours, start to finish.
The dragon took somewhat longer.  I wasn't sure what sort of dragon I wanted to
create.  After several protoypes, wound up with the current western-looking
dragon (inspired by humming "its so easy" from Pete's Dragon for about 4
hours)
I spent the next 3 days testing camera angles, adding finishing touches
(especially lamps) and refining textures a bit.  I tested a fireplace and
contemplated adding pictures to the background, but decided the fireplace
distracted from the focus of the players, and the pictures would be too poorly
illuminated and piss people off.  With the exception of anything paper, the
floors and the walls, all of the textures used were built-in blender
procedurals.

