Little Savings

Well, perhaps not so little, as I was able to correct the segfault on Koppi’s Bullet Physics Playground which was preventing to use more than a few objects. Then I was able to use as many coins as my PC allows without getting too slow on the physics simulation (the heightfield coins were substituted for cylinders on the playground, and they tend to not rest easily).

As I mentioned, the coins are a pair of heightfields each one, so that is a lot of heightfields… but POV-Ray crunched them very fast as soon as I took the definition out of the coin macro. These coins come from an old experiment of mine, where the coin heightfields are pre-rendered with another scene. For this occasion I’ve just added one more coin, and changed some of the texts and figures, using fonts from UrbanFonts.

I did expend a lot of tests polishing the metal textures, but the success came finally when I combined the new albedo specular reflection with a high brilliance. At that stage the coins looked very good, and I wanted to do something more elaborated with them, so I used Google image search, as usual, to look for inspiration. When I seen the typical image of these decorative little chests plenty of coins, I wanted to do this concept… just a bit exaggerated.

The chest was modelled with Wings3D, and was the first mesh object to be tested inside the physics playground, as I had just added LUA bindings for the 3DS support already existing into the code. I loaded the chest 3DS file and then put some piles of cylinders floating over it. The result of the simulation was exported and rendered into the image you see at right.

Also, bellow you have the succession of pics that got me there… except for the last one with the vase, which is a sort of WIP for a future, perhaps undersea scene.

WIPS