TITLE: 7 the Hardest Way
NAME: Andreas Grates
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: Andreas.Grates@public.uni-hamburg.de
WEBPAGE: -
TOPIC: Out of Place
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: hard7_ag.jpg
ZIPFILE: hard7_ag.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray for Windows 3.61

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 7 to add signature/title and convert to JPG

RENDER TIME: 
    7 hours 57 minutes 6 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon 650 / 320 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


"6 and 1! That's 7 the hard way!"
"I know harder."
I took up the dice, rattled them a bit in my hands and threw 'em onto the blue
woollen table cloth.
For a moment too short to measure, there seemed to be a six and a one.
I waved vaguely with my other hand over the dice and there was a strange glow
under thethe dice as if from another world.
Little dice just barely visible, as if made of just a bit more dense air, seemed
to circle them both.
Then there was it. Seven eyes looked up into our four.
"7 and 0. That's 7 the hardest way."


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Idea:
There. That's what happens if you don't come up with any idea until one week
before deadline. Then you have one, and realize that there's no way you could
make it in time. Then you pick up ANOTHER idea from what you've got lying
around on your HD.
Why is this matching the topic "Out of Place"? Well? looked at the dice? One eye
is clearly out of place! :-)

Modelling:
It's mainly (OK, EXCLUSIVELY) the "dice generator"-macro I used for my entry
"Law of Chance", just tuned up a bit.
It uses the same, unchanged geometry and I just added another parameter (I think
I, too, changed something in the way the dice get the textures by handing over
a parameter) to make the dice "magic" (The 1 disappears XOR 6 to 7).

Texturing:
Real effort went into the texture of the ground. I tried to emulate in blue what
you see if go down with your nose onto a snnoker table and have a
cloooooooooooooose look. Your eyes will hurt as mine did, but I saw just this
slightly turbulent quilted structure. tried with just that, and matching
normal. MicroNoise (Bozo pattern, really big magnitude, scaled really small)
used.

Lighting:
Two weird experiments folded into one, one with rather promising, one with
rather disappointing outcome.
Experiment 1: Dummy-osity (Radiosity with dummies, filed and loaded into scene
with real objects).
Dummies for the dice were spheres with rather extreme pigment (color rgb
<100,0,0>, color rgb<0,200,0> - green didn't seem to propagate in radiosity as
well as red).
Outcome in final render: Source-unlocateable glow under the dice in red and
green. This really was the desired effect, and I'm rather pleased with it,
though it was hell to drive out the artifacts.
Experiment 2: Dummy-tons (Photons with dummies, filed and loaded into scene with
real objects).
Dummies for the small, nearly invisible dicies were highly refracting ones,
photons shot from many, rainbow-hued lightsources lined up exclusively lighting
the scene. Shot at the big dice as well, simpler pigment in dummy-render, yet
same finish.
Outcome in Final render: Effect next to none, except in terms of time-to-render
:-(. Must have worked though, since the big dice DO show reflective caustics,
but not coloured ones as expected. Someone? REVISION! Just while checking the
quality of the conversion to JPG I had the caustic in the green illuminated
area in high zoom: It IS coloured! The effect is just rahter less visible than
I thought, and about the small dicies... well... don't know?

Miscellania:
Am really looking forward to NOT seeing the comment "TOO DARK", just for once.
Sorry for the Moire, but didn't have the time to add focal blur. What's your
best recipe against that?

