TITLE: No Aspirin needed!
NAME: Benoit Kloeckner
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: benoit.kloeckner@free.fr
WEBPAGE: piqueselle.free.fr

TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: games.jpg
ZIPFILE: games.zip
RENDERER USED: 

  povray 3.6


TOOLS USED: 

  
  The Gimp v2.0
  

RENDER TIME: 

  14 hours


HARDWARE USED: 

  Pentium 4, 2 GHz, RAM 384 Mo

  

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Games can be very complicated, but reduce just one parameter, and 
they become much more simpler. Unfortunately, as for bikinis, they 
follow "the smaller, the more expensive" rule. The same than casino:
minimal brain usage, maximal bank account damage.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I was very enthousiast when I saw the topic, as I am fond of the 
short code images (see my other submission). But I had time to make 
a more technical image this summer, so I started to search an idea. 
  It started with a 4x4 chess board. I planed to present it alone.
The pieces are intend to have minimalist style, with just what is
necessary to recognize them. They are CSG (with many hyperbolas) 
except for the upper part of the knight that is an symmetrized 
height field. There were two tricky parts. The first was to compute 
the parameters to smoothly place tori on the hyperbolas, to make 
them round at top and bottom. The computation is not difficult by 
itself, but there are three kind of mathematicians: those who can 
compute and those who can't. The second was to design the knights;
I used paths and gaussian blur in the Gimp, but there is still an
angle between the two sides (invisible on the image). In fact I
choose to put knights and not bishops because it was more 
challenging. The texture are simple (procedural, two layers) 
variations on standard textures of stones.inc.
  After that I got the idea of a 2x2x2 rubik's cube. It was very 
simple to model, but know with two games I had to do more of them.
  The Draughts set was an easy one, of course. For the wood textures
I just modified some from woods.inc.
  I already had an unfinished goban and stones in my stuff, so it
didn't took long to make a smaller version. I chose not to put the
stones in a play shape because it would have shown that 5x5 go 
really is boring.
  Then the Othello game came up to my mind. For the plastic part of
the board, I designed a height field with the gimp. It was the 
simplest and better looking solution I could imagine. For the 
texture of the green board, I did not try some complicated method
and just used crand.
  Last, abalone. The big problem was the little plots between the 
holes. I did not want to learn to use a mesh modeller (at least
it almost convinced me), and end up with a CSG version that is
not exactely right. The right plots are rounded and cut cylinders,
mine are rounded polyhedras. But it looks ok even from quite short 
distance. The rest of the board is more or less simple CSG. Total it
is several hundred pieces, and most of the render time is due to it.
  Then I had to put all this games together. I chose a store because
I wanted the "no aspirin!" labels. To had details, I made visible
the layers of wall paper (just small cylinders with filter patterned
pigment). The wood texture of the shelves is again an adaptation
of some wood.inc texture. The price tags are once more designed with
the gimp. I add a not-too-white filter pigment and a not-too-flat
normal.
  I just had left to set the lights (I think it is the next domain I
should learn in more details; here there are just a few white fading
area lights), camera and radiosity settings. I do not know if focal 
blur could add something, it seemed useless here.

