TITLE: The Silver Screen
NAME: Christian Blouin
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: cblouin@cs.dal.ca
WEBPAGE: http://www.ca.dal.ca/~cblouin/Blouin/         (raytracing sub-page yet to be published)

TOPIC: Great Invention
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: silvrscr.jpg
ZIPFILE: silvrscr.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.5

TOOLS USED: 

        Modeling
         Povray 3.5
         Moray 
         Wing 3D (www.wings3d.com)
         Terragen
        Textures (additional):
         Paint shop pro 7.2


RENDER TIME: 
    3 X 9h 40min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual Xeon 2.4GHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The Silver Screen - If I had to name only one art form that is largely driven by
(technical) invention, it probably would be the Cinema. This scene is inspired
from the movie "Shadow of the vampire", a fiction about the actual shooting of
the 1922 classic: Nosferatu. In the movie, the director makes a deal with a
real vampire to pretend to be an eccentric actor playing a vampire. Invention
being the theme, I intended to mangle reality and fiction in this scene by
having Nosferatu use a projection on the wall to _return_ back to the
Carpathians.

In the earlier days, the line between art and mad science was all the more
blurred as the crew was wearing lab coats while on the set! 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is my first IRTC entry and truly my real attempt to make a finished scene.
I went a long way in the last two months, believe me.

Modeling
Most of the items in this scene are procedurally generated: The movie set
railing system, the reel shelves, the paper clutter on the floor. I used Moray
to get the spline to look good to model the reel case, but other items such as
the light projectors were designed from scratch with the most compact code as
possible. I ended-up creating a few macros in the process to generate clutter
and the movie set railing.  The shelves containing film reel cases are
populated using a hidden Markov process to generate the texture and the stacks.
I intend, in the near future, to write up a general purpose macro for this
random model which allows to create heterogeneity while still using a uniform
random number generator.
  
Nosferatu was my very first attempt at doing mesh modeling. I used Wing 3D, a
wild and free subdivision surface software. I exported to povray mesh2
structure using the plug-in from Danni Coy
(http://www.midcoast.com.au/~rgcoy/software.html). The table, chairs and the
raven are also modeled from scratch using subdivision. This was great fun.
The image_map used to project on the back wall was generated using Terragen. The
terrain model is a fractal that meant to resemble a bit to a Carpathian vista.
I wanted to use forester to make a composite image including a castle, a few
tortured trees and some circling crows.  Forester didn't want to cooperate this
time around. The terragen sourcefiles are included in the zip archive but there
is nothing special about them.

Texturing
Most textures in this scene were created using the help of Moray to preview the
result. The fanciest texture made was applied on the floor: I used a
texture_map to define where the wear on the floor's wax was the most marked. In
low light, this neat effect doesn't show as much as I would have liked. Anyhow,
texture maps are most useful.

Lighting and rendering
I wanted a cold looking scene to emphasize the artificial elements and to
polarize the lighting of the scene between the fake set and the "true"
landscape. Some radiosity gives depth and more contrasts.  The final touch
comes from a focal_blur centered around Nosferatu and the raven.


