TITLE: He's so absent (His head is everywhere except on him)
NAME: Diego Magnani
COUNTRY: Italy
EMAIL: diegocg@quipo.it
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Absence
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: soabsent.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender internal renderer


TOOLS USED: 
    Blender 2.42a for modelling, Picture Publisher and Wood Workshop for
bitmap textures


RENDER TIME: 
    52 minutes and 10 seconds at 1024x768


HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1700 XP, 512 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I tried to create a scene with a funny surreal atmosphere. First I made a search
on my italian-english dictionary for "absence". Like in italian, the sense of
"absent" can be referred to a mental condition (absent-minded), in Italy we say
"Dove ho la testa?" (Where do I have my head?)
So I figure to me a scene with a man without his head, but I found this not
enough signicant.  It was necessary that the absence of the head was
compensated from something that remembered that the head itself could have been
there until that moment. 
So I filled the scene with obsessive presence of copies of the actual object,
that confirm the absence of the actual object itself.  In this step I added
also background with stars. While I experienced to render the scene, casually I
tried to remove the walls and the ceiling, leaving all the remaining objects. I
was very pleased by the resulting effect of this further absence, I thought
that increased the surrealistic mood I was searching.
At the present I'm reading a book on "2001. A space odissey", one of my favorite
movies, and immediately this headless character sitting all alone in a room
suspended in the space reminded me Dave Bowman in the Louis XVI style room at
the end of  the movie.
Therefore I put some references to Kubrick's masterpiece (the armchair on that
the character is sitting, the poster on the absent wall).
Besides, in 2001 the absence of gravity in the space is very underlined. And in
fact in my scene it is present only inside the room, but just beyond the
boundaries limited from the invisible walls it not exist any more.
There is also something of autobiographical in this headless guy even if he's
not my physical self portrait. He's a very creative mind (i'm not sure i am!).
Clearly in the beginning he experienced to draw some sketch using traditional
media,  but only now, sitting at its pc with blender on, he's comfortably sure
to reach his goal, recovering his head. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


All began from the head. A smoothed cube with a lot of extrude and knife tools
operations and a levels 3 Catmull-Clark subsurf modifier added, two spheres for
the eyes, then some white clouds (simple flat bezier curves with a little
bevel) on the blue sky (voil_ the Magritte's touch!).
I rendered this first file and so obtained the texture for pictures on the
wall.

New file for the room.
First, I put a lot of cubes in that cubic room ;-). Then, i model the character
with the same method used for the head. Also the jacket and the Louis XVI style
armchair are modelled from polygon meshes with subsurf modifiers applied. And
so for wall sockets and plugs. I got the wires from 3d bezier open curves
beveled with bezier circles.
Other furnitures, pc, luxo lamp on the table, the door, cups, pencils, ink
bottles, etc. are obtained from simple polygonal modelling.

The greater number of objects employ blender built-in materials. The floor and
the chest of drawers have some bitmap textures applied, made with Wood Workshop
and adjusted in Picture Publisher, while for picture's frames I used procedural
built in textures (wood).

I put all objects, except for 2001 movie poster and lamp globe, on a layer with
several light sources having effect only on it. The lamp hanging from the
ceiling contains two spot lights, one pointed to the floor, the other towards
the ceiling, and the main light source for the scene, an area light with 16
samples with umbra, dither and noise activated. I put also several sun lights
pointed to ceiling, floor and... walls (I keep those lights even after the
walls are removed), and some local spot adding more light for the pictures.
The poster is on a single layer with his own light source. The crystal globe of
the lamp is on their own separate layer too, but it cast transparent shadows on
the floor.




