TITLE: The Tortoise and the Hare.
NAME: Diego Magnani
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: diegocg@quipo.it
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: torthare.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.37a


TOOLS USED: 
    Blender 2.37a, Picture Publisher and The Gimp for the texture maps


RENDER TIME: 
    6 hours 49 minutes at 1024x768


HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1700 XP, 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is my personal interpretation of a well-known theme, fashioned like in some
old short animated movies.
My intent is representing the more significant feature (for me) of speed, that
is his relativity.

Speed theme, modern times obsession, with a reference to Tex Avery's "Tortoise
beats Hare". Speed is a relative concept, which depend by the system in which
we observe a body in motion.

We can see there are two different speed limits, one for hares and the other for
tortoises. Mr. Cecil Turtleson is a wise tortoise, and surely He knows last
developments of modern physics, included Restricted Relativity Theory by Albert
Einstein.

Cecil Turtleson is driving a Model "T" Pickup Ford. Everyone knows that "T"
stands for "Tortoise"! ;-)
Henry Ford introduced a big acceleration in industrial production with modern
assembly-line.
Speed of those cars was very reduced, compared with today models, but we know at
that time it was considered very high and sometime very dangerous.

We're living in the Age of Speed: all is fast, computers, weapons, planes, cars,
etc. Everything works at fantastic speed. But, from the point of view of an
hypothetical alien observer, our world could look like a very slow system (of
course, I can only suppose this).

The hare, owner of a sporting car that is a unique masterpiece (every single
piece is handmade), simply pay consequences of his ingenuous trust in the myth
of speed.

Out of theme reference to Coconino County is a personal tribute to George
Herriman's Krazy Kat. Originally, I tried to create a Coconino County landscape
for the background, with simple shapes and flat colors, in opposition to
detailed foreground objects, but I don't have enough time to correctly develop
this idea. With this contrast I want to reach a sense of unreality. So I kept a
little reference to Coconino in this work.
 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

First, I make a search on the internet for a lot of pictures and drawings of
cars, landscapes, roadsigns, tortoises, hares, etc.
I started to model the tortoise mesh, and here I used Catmull-Clark subdivision
surfaces.
Then I have modelled a pickup T Ford of the Twenties, using polygon meshes for
chassis and wheels, and several nurbs surfaces for rounded parts of coachwork
and for the hood (late, I have converted nurbs surfaces to meshes, and applied
them subdivision surfaces to smooth them). For fenders I've modelled flat
meshes with subsurfaces, then parented them to bezier curves to deform to
desired shape. I don't want to obtain an exact copy of the original car, so I
deform car to fit it to Cecil.
For the hare's car I take inspiration from Jappic, a very small racing car of
Twenties.
I used meshes with subsurfaces for the hare too. 

Textures.
Road, mountain, gardrail, sky on background: all procedural built in Blender
textures, working on colorband values (i.e. for sky texture, I started with
default Clouds texture, using colorband to obtain isolated clouds on blue
background).
Most objects are subdivided in vertex subgroups, each with his own simple
Blender material.
Text lines on the car: image map with alpha channel, original image created with
Picture Publisher.
"Speed Limit" text: image map created with the Gimp, different layers for color
and bump mapping.
Turtle shell: image maps for color mapping. I created also grayscale layers to
use them for displacement maps on the original subsurfaced smooth shell mesh.
This is better than use simple bump maps.

Light sources.
Two sun lights with the same direction and intensity, only one cast shadows.
Other small short range local spotlights round Cecil's face, with effect only
on Cecil layer.

Finally I open rendered image with the Gimp only to compress it a bit.

I apologize for my english so poor, specially if compared to the polygon number
of my Blender file :-)



