TITLE: Artillery
NAME: Toby Green
COUNTRY: CAN.
EMAIL: the_dark_allies@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/blender211/
TOPIC: Winter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: artiller.jpg
ZIPFILE: artiller.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender Creator 2.23

TOOLS USED: 
    Terragen, Poser, Gimp (for Windows)

RENDER TIME: 
    ~40 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1.2 / ProSavage / 480 Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


        Commander Ironberg slowly scanned the horizon.  Today was the coldest
day yet, and he began to feel frostbit through the light clothing which had
been issued months before.  The war should of been over a long time ago, but
had gone on longer than expected.  Now the winter front had set in.  'How many
times, in history has this been repeated', he mused to himself.

        During this new age World War, people were finally becoming used to it
since many months had passed.  However, the bombardments had stopped for the
last few days, as religious holidays had caused a short term break on both
sides.  While at home children slept in bed dreaming of Santa and parents
worried about getting presents in time, the solders on the winter front had
other things on their minds.
        
        Ironberg scanned the horizon, not with any special optics, but his own
eyes to view the landscape in peace.  Despite the cold, it was beautiful to see
the new fallen snow, instead of two feet of mud that was the only thing to see
on the battle-field which they had trudged through all these miles.
        
        Now the story may take multiple paths from here:

1. In a quick salute to mother nature, the commander acknowledged the scenery,
then went down below to warm up in his machine of death.

2. Viewing the beautiful landscape, suddenly a tremendous bright light in the
distance erupted.  The commander quickly raised his arm to shield his eyes,
knowing exactly what had just happened.  Someone had suddenly ended the
cease-fire in the worst way possible...

3. It's for your viewing pleasure, up to you to interpret what happens here...  
     


        Originally, I had planned on making some sort of Christmas theme, but
knew this would most likely be done to death.  Then suddenly I realized a
Winter Front scene would still fit the topic but help add some variation.  I
liked this project very much, as it let me make my first military vehicle, and
I hope to make more sometime soon.
        Some notes about the vehicle.  First of all, it is NOT a tank.  It is a
howitzer as a matter of fact.  However, it is on a tank chassis which makes
this a mobile howitzer (many are static).  The easiest way to tell the
difference, besides the fact that howitzers have larger shells, is that tanks
often can turn their turrets 360 degrees, while howitzers have most of their
movement vertically, for bombarding targets around 15 to 30 miles away at
targets they don't even see.
        The model here was referenced from an L-33 howitzer.  It was a 155mm gun
on a Sherman chassis, 41,500kg weight.  Originally deployed in Israel.  If you
note the sides of the vehicle look a bit bare, you are right.  The real version
a bit plain instead of stylish.  I added extra detail in places to add
complexity, though didn't want to clutter up the sides and have someone point
out that this version varied from the real system.  
        While I had planned to continue to refine this project
(texturing/scene/detail/measurements), the deadline for the IRTC is here.  All
sagas must come to and end right?  On a final note here, I ran into physical
limits in blender.  It got to the point where I kept getting 'too many object'
errors during my modeling.  I am at the point where it is hard to squeeze
anything else in, the few layers supplied are pretty full as it is.  Perhaps
next time I will try a scene which is simpler, or user another 3D system
altogether, such as the amazing PovRay.  



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


        A friend of mine years ago had given me a pocket book on armoured
vehicles.  From here I selected on doing a L-33 howitzer because it looked
appealing to me (Yes, I know everyone is modeling Panzer and Tiger tanks these
days).  My next step was to download reference images off the internet.  I
spent a while researching, I found a few images, not too much to go from but
they were a help.  
        One problem with my few images was I never could see as much detail as I
wanted in areas.  Also in places where there was virtually no distinguishable
features such as the inner section where the hull connects to be breach, I've
had to model guesswork as best I could to make something that looked proper and
realistic.
        Over all I tried to copy it to specs, but I know there can be more
refinement, such as the cockpit area.  One thing which had me guessing a lot at
first is that the few images I had, actually had a lot of variation of items as
well from one to the next.
        I started the modeling by working on the top part and working down. 
Mostly I used nurbs for modeling, though ended up converting many of them to
mesh as I could not get them to be textured properly in blender, and in some
instances the application would crash on me altogether.
        For the texturing, no UV mapping was done.  I used the standard
projection methods.  The only real curvy object which may have needed UV
mapping was perhaps the front gear-box, which I had used sub-surfs for.  Though
the projection tended to work out fine without it.  
        I still needed more complexity for texturing control, and this was
carried out by using multiple material indices.  This is the first real project
I started using indices, and I am liking them a lot for control.  
        Most the texturing was left for last.  Though I do like good lighting
when I'm working on just the modeling.  During the beginning stages a few of
you may have seen my work in progress.  The lighting method was faked GI.  I
carried this out by sub dividing an ico-sphere, and duplicating multiple
spotlights to the structure, while I deleted the bottom half of the ico-sphere,
and made the faces point inward.  Thus, I had many spot lamps illuminating the
center of the scene with a nice lighting system that looked much more realistic
than any default.
        In order to prevent the large black ring on the ground as commonly seen
in fake GI scenes (from outside the ico-sphere), I set the bottom plane to not
receive any shadows from the GI.  However, I did set up a special large spot
light above to shine down and give a shadow to the plane, while letting the
texture give out a little emmitance.
        Note, I had originally wanted to use radiosity, however even setting the
bugs aside, it was much too limited, and the workload for a scene like this
would have been like beating myself over the head with a baseball bat.  First
of all, I would have had to convert everything to mesh.  Then after the
radiosity was run, my mesh would have been combined into 1 object, amoungst
other problems.  You then have to manually break up each piece afterward, and
then re-texture them one by one.  And if you don't like how it turned out, you
get to go through it all over again, amoungst other things not mentioned.  It's
a shame that an easier system was not ever implemented since they did put an
effort in to do the calculation for radiosity.
        Usually I tend to not use alpha maps, but the nose piece here was an
exception.  After making a beved object with a profile curve, I still had to
cut out a hole for the shells to pass through.  Being one who hates converting
things to ugly meshes, I hit on the idea of BURNING a hole through the front
with a circular alpha map.  This worked splendid, and allowed me to change hole
size, curves, etc with much ease.  This is one trick you young (and some old)
modelers should keep in mind next time you are disgruntled over poor boolean
tools (no matter what you need to cut through).
          The background was modeled in Terragen.  Originally I had planed on
importing a whole mesh into blender, but realized only the image in the back
buffer was necessary.  There is one plane used in the scene, which ends and the
terragen image fills in the rest.  Getting them to integrate together was hard,
I tried everything from gradients to praying.  However, the render gods just
didn't want to give me that class A integration I wanted.

        This time around for the IRTC I wanted to try out a focal blur for depth
of field effect.  I thought perhaps it would add some realism and let me
experiment with something new yet again.  Because blender does not have support
for this, I circumvented it by parenting the camera onto a small circle, while
keeping it aimed at an empty (null) which I set up as the focal-point.  When
the circle was turned through animation options, I was able to get the camera
to slightly move through 1 frame which caused the blur effect seen.  For the
terragen image in the background however I used gimp to blur it, using the Gaus
system.
        During the modeling stages I was very disgruntled by the fact I was
getting very bad aliasing artifacts, even with the over sampling (ASO) turned
full up to level 16.  This is quite common with this render system I used and I
went looking for a better option besides 'live with it', or 'restart the
model'.  
        After some hunting I found some people had found a solution by rendering
the image very large, then later on rescaling it down to eliminate artifacts. 
In the end however, the slight blurring function I created almost magically
removed all those artifacts, even those which were very close to the focal
point.  If using this alias fix method, just be sure to check into how your 2-D
application works first, as I have been told some will function very poorly in
relation to others for this system.
        The textures were all post processed in Gimp for Windows.  Some of them
were made from scratch, while others were edited from my old collection of
scraps and bones I throw in my old files when I see something useful.  I often
tend to stick with targa formats, and try my best not to lose any data during
compression.  Besides image textures, I also used a few procedurals here and
there as well.
        While I am on the topic of textures, keep in mind when your including an
image for a scene in the camera's back-buffer, that if you change the size of
your final render, you also should remake the back buffer image to scale, or it
may tend to look pixelated and ruin the over-all quality.
        One thing which attracted a lot of attention when I was working on this,
and one of the most asked questions was how did I get the dirt textures to
match so well and fade off.  This was done by using gradients and alpha maps. 
Also good tweaking of the texture dimensions/positions when projecting on items
also helps.  
        Alright, I will try and end it here as my intent was not to write a
whole book on 'the making of irtc...".  If you managed to last this long, I do
hope you have learned a few tips and tricks, as well as get some pleasure from
the resulted scene.