About the picture of the month

This picture has been rendered for the once-each-two months stills competition sponsored by the IRTC (Internet Ray Tracer Competition). This is my very first appearance in this competition, which proves to be of a high but challenging level. Most of competitors use raytracers, so we get at the end pictures of high standing, particularly in the reflections and refractions areas. We could also note that only 5 competitors on the 89 have been using Blender (four frenchies and a scottish), but the general quality of these pictures will surely tend to spread Blender's good notoriety. However, it is sad there wasn't much more english or spanish speaking people to enter the competition, because I know there are many valuable blender artists out there, in the Blender community, and because it could only spread much more our favorite software's reputation.

This time, the topic was 'The Laboratory'. My personal vision was to show a modern 'mad scientist', disdaining scalpels and such items in order to find the secret of virtual life on its computer's screen. Of course, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the virtual creature turns against its creator. Humoristic reference to the X-Files TV show : the scientist badge is in fact the badge of Fox Mulder, taken somewhere on the Internet.

From a technical point of view, this picture plays heavily on light effects to mask the lack of a fully integrated Radiosity feature in Blender. Every spot (casting shadows) are backed by lamps with the 'Sphere' button activated. There are also many halos, such as the one from the computer screen. Glass shrapnels are in fact a particle system emitting 'parented' glass meshes. The result is quite satisfying, even if it could have been improved much.

For this scene, it's the first time I make such a extended use of the now standard Blender's UV-Editor. The Blender Manual, the Tutorial Guides, the paper sheets, the posters on the wall, the periodic elements table and the Linux distro were all mapped using the UV-Editor. Time was needed to paint textures for the scientist and to une UV-Editor on him also, but I couldn't do it in time.

The scientist (as well as the arm making its way out of the computer screen) is a DXF import from Poser 3.0 (Metacreations). A particular care was given to colors and textures for the scientist, whom all textures are procedural, excepting the bump map that depicts its middle age and scariness.

All objects have been dirtied and perverted with textures from 'Noise' type in the Ref channel and 'Clouds' type in the Col channel. It's a good way to break the apparent surfaces uniformity in Blender, and results are often very interesting (especially with the Noise texture in the Ref channel).

Now, let's see how will be judged this picture by the artists who entered the IRTC competition. I would especially like to bring to your notice the fair works of the other competitors using Blender, especially Stéphane Bourzeix and Pierre Huber. I hope we will be much more to enter the next IRTC competition, whose topic is 'Contrast'. The URL is : http://www.irtc.org.