TITLE: "Inside the magic hat."
NAME: Stefan Maes
COUNTRY: Belgium
EMAIL: maes@uia.ua.ac.be (until October)
WEBPAGE: http://sch-www.uia.ac.be/u/maes/
TOPIC: Magic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: smmagic.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Pov-Ray for Windows v3.01


TOOLS USED: 

        - sPatch by Mike Clifton
          (http://users.aimnet.com/~clifton/spatch/spatch.html)
        - bend.inc by Chris Colefax
          (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/)


RENDER TIME: 
    12-15h I guess. I had to interrupt tracing a number of
times.
         The bunny's ears are the problem elements. Remove them from
         the scene and a 800x600 AA0.3 trace is ready in 15minutes...



HARDWARE USED: 
    P166 with 32Mb of RAM. Win95.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


        Have you ever wondered what the rabbit did while waiting for the 
        magician to pull him/her out of the magic hat? Well, here's an idea.

        Tired of being dragged out of the hat by his ears (much like Roger
        Rabbit in the "Who framed ..."-movie Mr. Floppy decides it's time to
        quit this job. But since he doesn't want to end up on a table as
        dinner, he's looking for a new career. With his background/experience
        the choice was easy: magician! So he got himself a "Magic 101"
        toolkit for the apprentice magician. It was quite a disappointment
        for him, as several items seemed to be missing. What about a manual?
        But with the little items he got a good magician can create a lot of
        small, neat tricks. Anyone seen the "Stuff the white rabbit" magic
        shows on BBC television a few months ago...?
         


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


        I was looking around in my room for inspiration for a new subject
        to trace. I thought I should try and model something more 'organic',
        especially since I agreed to render some alien sprites for a Doom
        project (shameless plug for Functional Entropy and
        http://entropy.telefragged.com). Looking at the stuffed animals
        occupying the corner of my bed, the theme was decided. With the
        current IRTC topic in mind, I picked my bunny as a model. Should the
        modelling turn out well, I would turn it into a submission for the
        IRTC, which would have been my first after submitting twice to
        Matt Kruse's raytracing competition: sm_darts.jpg in December 1994
        (games) and sm_xrays.jpg in June 95 (science).

        The bunny was modelled with blobs using no modeller at all. I just
        started typing code and added blob components according to my
        intuition. Surely this isn't the best method to work as it requires
        lots of test renders, but seeing a model take the (desired) shape
        gave me great satisfaction/pleasure. The ears are simple prisms that
        were bend using Chris Colefax's great BEND.INC file. Needless to say
        this was a big hit on render times, so in all my later test renders
        I omitted the ears. (Re)Modelling the ears in sPatch e.g. might have
        been wiser, but the .INC-way was so easy and I was running out of
        time while trying to make a more complete scene...
         
        Also, I was too pleased with the result to really consider redoing
        the ears right away. Texturing was minor problem. I regretted not
        having paid attention to the fur/grass discussion on either the
        newsgroup or the IRTC mailinglist. The textures I came up with are
        maybe not that realistic, but since the bunny was never modelled after
        a real animal, who cares? I'm very happy with the way it turned out.
        Friends who I showed the final bunny seemed to like it as well. One
        of them even said it was my best image ever...

        When you think of magic and rabbits, magic hats are never far away.
        Hence the idea or better the question "What's inside the magic hat?"
        came up. So I started adding pretty standard magic items: cards,
        balls, coins, a rope, etc. But whatever I tried I couldn't get
        anything pleasing/coherent together. I needed something to link all
        these objects. Say, what about a "Magic 101" toolkit for wanna-be
        magicians? Modelling was pretty easy, as well as texturing. Unlike
        with the box of playing cards, I used raytraced (text{} object)
        instead of scanned/screen-captured images. Still there was something
        missing, as I tended to like my simple "bunny in the high hat in the
        spotlight" image_map (see box cover) better than my actual submission.
        (a larger image should be on my webpage soon).

        The problem with the image I had then, was that it was so clean, so
        ordered. It didn't look like the bunny was experimenting with his
        new toys. I tried scattering around some playing cards, but that
        didn't work. As I was about to give up, it hit me. What else can
        you do with paying cards? Make houses, or better, high towers. Of
        course you only do that when you're bored to the extreme. So I
        needed to bunny to be bored as well as a reason for him to be bored.
        Hence I replaced the manual by a simple leaflet explaing what magic,
        sorcery and witchcraft are. I needed it to be a bit cracked,
        wrinckled, whatever and so I modelled it in sPatch starting from a
        simple grid.

        Once all objects were in place, I changed the lighting: spot lights
        instead of point lights and all of them less bright. But once I got
        the scene rerendered at 800x600 AA0.3 I didn't really like what I
        saw. The background, i.e. a big cylinder representing the outlines
        of the magic hat, tended to distact from the image. It was either
        too plain or too detailed. So in the end I opted for no background
        at all. Just plain black, as in all of my previous images. Maybe I'm
        just trying to hide my lack of skills, but that way my images look
        more like stills than incomplete...

FOR THOSE WONDERING
         
        - what's written on the box:
        Boxcover: "Magic 101" & "By S. Maes"
        Sides: "Magic 101" & "Amaze your friends with 101 easy-to-learn
        tricks (stuffed rabbit not included)

        - what's written on the box of cards:
        "Black Jaguar" & "Playing cards"

        - what instructions are written on the paper:
        "Magic 101
         Magic: (1) Art of controlling events by the pretended use of 
              supernatural forces; Superstitious practices based on
             a belief in supernatural agenciues.
         (2) Art of obtaining mysterious results by tricks
         (3) Quality produced as if by magic
         Sorcery: (1) Witchcraft (usual word)
           (2) Evil acts done by sorcery
         Witchcraft: Use of magic"
        
        (Source: Oxford Student's Dictionary of Current English - 1980)

