TITLE: Return of the Tooth Beasts
NAME: tor andersson
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: d97ta@efd.lth.se
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I submit to the standard raytracing competition
JPGFILE: daemons.jpg
ZIPFILE: daemons.zip
RENDERER USED: 

  povray3 for win, povpro, povray3 for linux


TOOLS USED: 

  sPatch (what would I do without it...)
  hf-lab -- terrain
  form -- plants
  moray -- tower
  Picture Publisher 6.0 -- height field manipulation, material map drawing
  povwin text editor
  cjpeg
  gimp
  emacs
  patience (it took over 5 'final' renders to get the lighting the way I
  wanted it :( )
  etc...


RENDER TIME: 

 800x600,A0.3 
  p200mmx, povwin: 53 mins
  p200mmx, povpro: 42 mins
  p2-233, linux: 30 mins
  
  Peak memory used:         44579374 bytes (thats about 45 megs)

GAMMA USED:
  Heh? I don't know! With the 'gamma.gif' image, the lines/gray are
  the same brightness at 2.4 when my image looks at its best.

  The image is supposed to look sort of pale blue tinted, but darkish.
  It is a little pale, so turn down brightness and up contrast
  'til it's just perfect :-)

  The darkest parts of the water are supposed to be almost black.


HARDWARE USED: 

  P200MMX, 96Mb RAM, 4Mb Matrox Mystique gfx card, EIZO-F55 17" monitor (win95)
  P2-233, 64Mb RAM, 2Mb Matrox Mystique, Compaq 17" monitor (linux redhat 5.0)


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  In a distant time, when civilization is long dead, only ruins remain to tell
  of the great history that has long since passed away to dust.

  As have the magical barriers holding the daemons from the realm of nature.
  And beasts are slipping through...

  The question is, will the blind Tooth Beasts survive
  in a world in which they have not lived in for Aeons?
  Will mother nature get rid of them as the misfits they are?

  Or is it in their nature to be unnatural?



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  idea
------
  Nature... a very vague definition!

  Maybe a clash between artificial and organic?  -- Nah.
  What about some kind of creature? -- Mmmhmm.
  Landscape -- ...bryce; nope, too boring...
  Run dry of good ideas...
  Give up hope of doing an entry this turn too...

  *weeks pass*

  weird semi lucid dream with pink demons with really HUGE teeth...

  *weeks pass*

  vague attempt to model the beasts...
  another few weeks pass, wondering how the
  beasts can eat with teeth like that...
  And where are the eyes? I don't remember any from my dream.

  *weeks pass, midsummer*

  I am bored, so I do some messing around in sPatch, and
  I come up with the tooth beasts you can see in this image.

  As said, the beasts are from one of my strange semi-lucid
  dreams, so maybe they ARE trying to break free!

   modeling
-----------
  Using sPatch is just so darned easy, I can hardly believe it!
  I can't imagine life without it.

  The tooth beasts, the bug, the trees, and the birds were all created
  in sPatch. I exported and textured the layers separately.

  The tooth beasts are just clones because sPatch models just eat memory...
  (Big drawback... it limits the usability of sPatch quite a bit)

  The flowers were created in Form for a previous image.
  I slightly modified the texture (added specular to make the
  leaves more 'waxy').

  The tower is a bunch of superellipsoids (0.3,0.3) thrown together
  in WinMoray (shareware version with the lousy nag screen)

  As for composing the scene, it was all done by hand. Considering it
  took >10 seconds to draw the tower in moray, I wouldn't dream
  of composing a scene with this many primitives in any graphic modeler
  (over 13000 frame level objects, all in all)

  To my aid I used a specially designed texture: a grid.
  (see image in zip file: grid.jpg, grid.inc)
  This really speeded up the guess work of placing my objects, so I could
  spend more time playing around with textures and lighting rather than
  wasting time trying to put my objects where I WANT them...

   texturing
------------
  Most textures are either simple plain colors with varying amounts of
  phong/specular, or slightly modified standard
  textures (T_Stone8, S_Cloud1 to name a few)

  The water I made myself, it's a blue tinted black with reflectivity
  around 0.7 and some phong on it. I think it looks pretty photo
  realistic.

  The grass texture is an image map I ripped from Sonyas Summer entry,
  in turn ripped from 3d Studio. It's in jpeg form in the zip file.

   lighting
-----------
  The lighting was tricky... the trees cast shadows on the tower, so I had
  to place a light source coming from another direction (as you
  can see by the highlights in the bug's eyes)... too bad.

  One light is shadowless and is used to brighten up the tree trunks
  which are mostly in shadows... too bad patches light up on both
  sides when doing this...

  I also added a slight blue-ish ground fog to give some depth
  cuing and a distant haze.


