EMAIL: pbrasolin@yahoo.it
NAME: Paolo Brasolin
TOPIC: Future
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Gundam
COUNTRY: Italy
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: MegaPOV v1.0
TOOLS USED: Anim8or v0.85, UVMapper v0.25e (beta), PoseRay v3.0.2.272, Corel Photo-Paint 9, GIMP v1.2.5
RENDER TIME: 2h 56m 52s
HARDWARE USED: PIII 600Mhz, RAM 192 Mb
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Initially I thought about what is the future. The future do not exist, until it becomes present, so it will be just what we decide. So I started modeling the Gundam: I used my brother's old toy as reference. I wanted it to look like a toy, not like a real Gundam. I was thinking about putting it in an office, as a memento, and to emphasize the fact that the owner of the office works as an advanced robotics ingeneer. It wasn't a bad idea, but an evening, while I was just thinking around, I came up with this idea: maybe in the future our descendants will forget about us and, maybe, after "rediscovering us" they will misunderstood our culture, our art, our toys... just as we could have done with our ancestors! So... here it is.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: It is not a very complex image. I started modeling the gundam and, since I wanted it to look quite "real" i used a lot of polygons: the final version is composed by 40740 vertices. I used Anim8or to model it, divide it into limbs, to create a skeleton and to pose it ( I included the an8 file in gundam.zip ). Then I exported it to OBJ, I created the UV coordinates with UVMapper and finally I exported it to an inc file with PoseRay. I used Corel Photo-Paint to make the texture: just some color stains and a bit of noise plus a bit of smoothing. After that I started writing the main scene. Just some boxes and cylinders: i kept it quite simple. For the laser I used just a no_shadow cylinder with an agate color_map like [0 rgbt <1,0,0,0.89>][1 rgbt <1,0,0,0.99>] and ambient 2. I also put two lights at the two extremities: they make a nearly invisible red aura visible on the white surface. The spotlights are just 4*4 area lights with some spotlights parameters and a looks_like sphere. I wrote the explanation text ( thanks to Spencer Collyer, Jerry Anning and Aaron 'Serac' Hill for the help ) using the GIMP. Just two other things: I raise max_trace_level to make the transparencies look better and lowered  the radiosity brightness, since I wanted a quite dark scene, not a daylight.