TITLE: Rigged Game
NAME: Thorsten Thielen
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: thth@c2226.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.c2226.de
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ththgame.jpg
ZIPFILE: ththgame.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray 3.50c-10 (from Kubuntu Linux 5.04)

TOOLS USED: 
    My trusty FTE programmers' editor and whatever
    imagination I could spare :-) GIMP for conversion to JPEG.

RENDER TIME: 
    9.5 hours ( hours without focal blur)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium IV 2.8 GHz, 2G RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


You may be the asketic of asketics, you may live from air and love
alone, but there still are some things that you can't just do away with
if you still want to be part of the game.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This image for the "Minimalism" topic is my first submission to the 
Internet Ray Tracing Competition. I tried to create something that
matches the topic both in style as well as in motive; as a result on
the one hand the topic suited my style of working rather good - on the
other hand I found it rather hard to come up with something that did
reflect some sense of "minimal" but still was interesting enough on the
visual side.

As I still haven't found a modeller that I really like, I do all the
object modelling, placing, etc. simply "by hand" and use Povray for all
previews (and of course for the final rendering too ;-). This scene
features a number of models created by using rather simple CSG
modelling without any "advanced" features at all. I managed to get away
with only two textures, a plain black and a white one, and two light
sources. I tried to work with the same elements (white smoothly rounded
main bodies with black smaller cutouts) and everything roughly in the
same scale as far as possible to cut down on the complexity.

Using only so few elements first did lead to a somehow boring visual
impression though, so I tried using other things to give it a little
more appeal:

I added a small amount of specular highlight and reflection to the
textures so the resulting effects add to the visual complexity of the
scene without actually adding some new elements otherwise. As one
exception from the general rule I added a normal (a crackle pattern
scaled very small, which gives a rather interesting look IMHO) to the
plane that all the other objects sit on. I also slightly tinted the
light sources in the blue direction to add at least a little color to
the picture. The shadows that are thrown also make the image look not
quite so plain, especially when the light sources are done as
area_lights. To reduce the plainness of the image even more I tried
using some focal blur (first time ever :-).

Everything used in this scene (models, textures, etc.) was created by
me from scratch specially for this image. Total time I worked on this
image until I started the final rendering (including some time for
doing test renderings - in far too good quality - I simply can't wait
to see the stuff :-) was about 22 hours.

