TITLE: Student
NAME: Toby Green
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: the_dark_allies@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: Under Construction
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: axis_and.jpg
ZIPFILE: axis_and.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender 2.21 (Linux)

TOOLS USED: 
    Blender 2.21, Gimp.

RENDER TIME: 
    ~12 seconds.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1.2, Savage4 card, ~half a gig ram.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  Remember that old Axis & Allies boardgame, where you could do anything from
brute force battles, to cheasing out and rolling dice for super-weapons?  I
decided I wanted to model something very similar to that game as it was one of
my favourites.  Here, the pieces seem to have a mind of their own.  No hand to
move them, or dice to roll needed. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

  I started by taking a screen shot of the entire Axis and Allies map (A&A) from
the computer version which used to be marketed by Hasbro.  This was then
rotoscoped and beveled into the marble countries. 
  Note:  If Europe doesn't look like europe should, I apologize.  I had to
decide to model from a real map of europe, or follow the cheasy version from
the original game.  Hence, I followed the game version of Europe, which I dont
think is exactly too bad at all.
  The playing pieces were a combination of sub-surfs, and typical meshes. 
Subsurfs having the majority here, and also this project was a learning
experience for me as I had not used them heavily before.
   I had intended to first go for a realism image, and export from blender to
.pov format.  Unfortunatly, there seemed to be one problem after another with
the script I was using, so I had to abandon that project.  Hence, the entire
render was done in Blender.
   Note: If you look at the source file, you will see a lot of nurbs have been
converted to mesh.  This is because the script to .pov needed everything to be
in mesh.  Any nurbs objects still present, are from items that were modeled
after I abandoned the attempt to export to povray.  However, I don't mind the
way the final render turned out either.
   Most of the playing pieces resemble the actual boardgame pieces.  However the
battleships I changed greatly.  One reason being I dont have the original
version here, and the computer version has the icons so small it's hard to see
actual detail.  The IPC chips were also highly modified, as I wanted something
more metalic and valuable looking than the typical cardboard stubs.
   Originaly, the materials for the marbles and water were procedural, but later
I worked on using textures from the net as I believe they looked better than my
original attempts.
   No objects were imported into this project, as I did all the modeling from
scratch.  The textures are the exception, though some of them were quite
modified by me.
   Since only spot lights in blender cast shadows (excluding radiosity), I had
once large one set to cast shadows only, and placed right near it a hemi light
as the light source.  I had been tempted to use the radiosity engine, but in
blender it's a bit more trouble-some than most apps.
   Well, I think i've talked enough here, besides it's past 3:30 am and I am
probably making a hundred spelling mistakes :).  I hope you enjoy this image as
much as I did making it.   





  




