Hello. Sorry for my English but it's not my native language.
The scene title is 'Katana Magic'. It represents a traditional Japanese dojo, a place for Martial Arts practicing, in this case specifically Aikido, made in wood with paper windows. Originally I thought to put two Aikidokas in first plane doing a technique called Iriminage, but I’m still working on human meshes, so I decided to put a Katana (the Samurai’s sword) as the center of interest.
Katana is not really used in Aikido practice. A wood sword called bokken is used to represent it but I decided to use a Katana because of its visual effect and all the magic surrounding the Samurai’s sword.
All objects where made by hand, with pencil, paper and lots of erasers. The only additional file used was a digital photo took by me on a real Aikido dojo to use it as an image map for Aikido Kanji (the Japanese characters).
Objects include basic primitives (columns, walls), csg objects (central furniture, Katana, lamps), lathes (small objects on central furniture, guns base), an image map representing Aikido Kangi (the Japanese caracters), and some superquadric ellipsoid objects for Tatami (the floor with mattress).
The image map of the picture in the wall is the same photo, edited in Corel Photopaint to get a horizontal format. (It must be a picture of Morihei Ueshiba, the Aikido Founder, but I didn’t know if I could use any picture of him without copyright).
All texture are from standard include files or variations of them.
There are two principal lights illuminating the scene, two spot lights for the lamps and an orange light that produces light beam through a box containing scattering media. Two additional emitting medias were used for lamps halos.
Radiosity were turned on with error_bound 0.4, count 100, recursion_limit 1.5 and all other options predefined.
Render takes 7 hours and 17 minutes.
Detailed views were made with the +SC, +SR, +EC and +ER switches and resulting images were cropped out with Corel Photopaint.
