Title : Night Club Gallimimus' Warming Up
Artist : Jamie McCarter,
[email protected]
Rendering Time : 128 hours, 40 minutes on my 486 DX2-66 (I wish I had a
SGI Onyx, I wish I had a SGI Onyx, I wish. . .)
Programs Used : PoV, Moray, DeluxePaint IIe
I based the dinosaurs vaguely upon the Gallimimus. I modeled them in Moray
and drew the skin textures in DeluxePaint IIe. I based the skin texture
loosely on some rocks surrounding a water fall I had seen in Cape Breton,
N.S. The Gallimimus' are mostly bicubic patches that I linked together in
a hierarchy-like fashion. Then, by altering key control points those body
parts can be independently moved so that each dinosaur can be separately
controlled and contorted into the specific position required.
I used Moray v1.53 to model the scene, though even with 16 megs of ram I
ran out of memory! I was unable to fit the entire scene into Moray at one
time. To circumvent this problem I created the room (stage, lights and
camera) as a base file to work within. Then I created the tables in the
base file and then saved them away separately, deleting them from the base
file. Then I created the ferns and stored them away separately. Then the
drummer, singer and trumpeter dinosaurs were created, each in their own
separate file. Due to the raw amount of scene data, I was unable to see if
all of the objects interacted as desired.
I created the ferns by first creating the leaves out of two bezier patches,
one for each side or the leaf. Then, I put two leaves on a small
cylindrical stalk. To create each separate arm I copied the stalks and
rotated them relative to the stalk beneath. Then I copied the arm and
rotated and translated it around the main plant stalk to create the fully
fledged fern.
For the tables I realized that to actually render real light sources in
each lamp would be dreadfully slow. So I decided not to use real light
sources and to fake the lighting of the tables. I created special
colour_maps and other such stuff to simulate the lamp light. I rendered
this, and also made one test with real lights. My simulated light actually
looked better. :)
Every aspect of the image was test rendered until I was pleased with the
lighting, textures, and shapes. Through these test renders I made the
decision to use area lights after seeing small test renders with hard
shadows. Personally I think the soft shadows look really decent and
achieves a more realistic look.
After creating the entire scene I gave it to PoV to render. Then, after 5
minutes of parsing, I found my 16 megs of ram wasn't enough. So I created
a 20 meg swap file, and ended up running out of memory again. So I upped
it to 50 megs. I then ran out of symbols. So I upped those. I then ran
out of #declares. Unfortunately, PoV v2.2 doesn't allow this to be
increased, so I had to manually optimize all 3 megs of the data file,
carefully rearranging the data to remove the declares! (programmers: hint
here for a nifty little utility. Write me.) Once I had worked out the
declare problem I gave the data to PoV and sat back for more than 5 days
while it rendered. (Yes, I do have bounding boxes intelligently placed)
Finally, I hope you enjoy looking at my image as much as I enjoyed creating
it. Live long and Render.
