home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- About.Ball
- James M. Shook
- PO Box 140
- Cambridge, MA 02238
- BIXid:jshook
-
- This image uses a wide selection of Silver's features.
-
- The geometry of the objects in the scene is fairly simple. All of the
- objects except the ball were made in Sculpt 3D and converted to Silver
- format with InterChange from Syndesis.
-
- There are several objects which have IFF brushes wrapped on them. The
- wallpaper pattern, the markings on the plant and the rug pattern were all
- created in Deluxe Paint and saved as IFF brushes.
-
- Two built-in textures are used: the floor uses the checkerboard texture
- and the ball uses the layered texture. The floor was made somewhat
- reflective.
-
- The sunlight and shadow effect was created with Silver's stencil object.
- I made a 1 bit-plane image in a paint program of a window opening and
- loaded that into a stencil in Silver. I positioned it out of the range of
- the camera between the scene and the main light source so that the stencil
- cast shadows into the scene. It took a number of tries to get the light
- source and stencil in the right position to create a pleasing pattern of
- shadows and sunlight in the scene. Since Silver's solid modelling mode
- does not render shadows, I had to do full ray-traces to see where the
- shadows fell, but I would render only a small zone of the image, and use
- large-pixel trace mode to speed things up.
-
- There are two light sources and ambient light. The main light source
- was shifted to a slightly yellow shade to suggest sunlight. The ambient
- light was shifted slightly to the blue range to emphasise the contrast
- between the "sunlit" and shadow areas. The second light source was
- positioned "behind" the stairs to create a slight rimlight on the ball to
- help model the it and separate it from the background. I tried to make it
- seem that the source of this light was sunlight reflected off the painted
- white surface of the stair risers. This light source was made shadowless
- so that it would cast light on the ball even though it was behind the
- stairs.
-
-