CPSC 3710 Project
Garrett Speager
Feb 11, 2008
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What I Chose To Do
The hardest part to me was figuring out what I wanted to make, it took
a long time to decide on what I was going to model. None of
the landmarks I found appealed to me, and I kind of wanted to make an
indoor scene because I could play with multiple light sources.
After a lot of thinking and searching, I found 2 chess pieces in one of
the MORay example scenes, and I figured that would be fun to do.
So I decided on doing a Chess game with a board as my main focus of the project
but, I also threw in a room, because I didn't want the scene just floating out in space.
What I Used
Since I've never made a Ray tracing project before, I looked at the
PovRay from the beginning. I did a few tutorials
but the idea of scripting the
entire project was a little daunting. So I downloaded Blender, looked
at the interface and started the tutorial.
But eventually got confused and decided I was going to do it in POVRay. I figured if
I was going to attempt POVRay, I better at least see what MORay was.
Frankly, I don't know why anyone would try using POVRay without the
MORay interface, it made everything so much easier.
Difficulties
Well first I started out by going through the one tutorial I could
find. Now that I'm done it
turns out there's more at that site, but that one tutorial was all I
needed to get familiarized with the interface. There were 2 main
difficulties I ran into working with MORay:
1) Managing the Texture interface, originally I just wasn't clear on
how to add different textures to the MORay Material interface, But
once I figured it out it was super easy from there.
2) Making meshes smooth and round, when I was modelling I would take
the basic shapes and converth them to a mesh, and manipulate the
points to get a shape like I wanted. But I discovered that all I
needed to do Was Edit the mesh and increase the Subdivision Surface -
Subdivision Level.
The actual final difficulty that I faced was waiting for MORay to render the scene.
It took 5 minutes on average(on my home computer) for POVRay to parse the script and
another 5 to 10 minutes to render the scene without Anti-Aliasing enabled.
For the main Image 3x3 AA was enabled and it took 1 hour and 3 min to render.
If there were more glass pieces in the
scene then it would take much longer to render. Even though the glass was much
prettier I still rendered from the direction of the black metal pieces more often
to save time.
Final Thoughts
Although I've never done a project like this before, I enjoyed it a lot and could
see myself sinking even more time into a project like this.
As for sources. I was inspired by one of scenes included in MORay, but my scene was
entirely my own work. I did an image search with Google just to make sure I was making
the pieces correctly. Also all the textures I used were from the POVRay texture library.
You can see more images here.