"Chairs" Contest Entry: "Drafting Room"

Since the scene started as just a couple of drafting stools in an empty room, the next obvious thing to add was a drafting table. The drafting table was really the thing that took the most time to build. It's been about 10 years since I actually sat down at a drafting table in school, and I couldn't mentally picture the mechanics of the pulley system for the crossbar, so I had to come up with a functional design on my own and then model it.

Of course, the fine braided wire for the pulley system turned out to be a real pain. It ends up as just a very fine detail in the final render, but had to be modeled accurately to keep me happy. Once I figured out the appropriate diameter and texturing, I had to actually model the wires looping around the table via the pulleys. I figured extruding along a path would be good. Only I forgot that it really means it wants a _PATH_! I had modeled the path out of points and couldn't extrude along it! Arg. Ok, I could re-model the path using a real path object, but it's so much more painful. I really wish Imagine would let you take a point-based object and turn it into a spline-based path!

Okay, so once the path was properly built, I extruded my wire template along it. But then I found out that the 20 or so segments that I wanted doesn't work because it tries to make 20 _equal_ length segments instead of segmenting at the path's nodes! This obviously makes for really crappy round corners. So to get the corners looking nice and round, I have to extrude the wire with about a thousand segments, then go back and mix-master the resultant object to eliminate the 900 extra segments I didn't want (to speed up the display and rendering time).

So.. The the stools, eh? I guess I should talk about those since they're the supposed 'focus' of the image. Well, admittedly they are pretty simple, because that's exactly what a real-world drafting stool is: simple. They're a bunch of aluminum tubes for the legs, a circular tube for structural support at the base, and a nicely curved plate cap at the top with a foam cushion on it. I got a good texture going on the cushion to simulate that rubber 'leatherette' texture you tend to have on foam cushions, but it doesn't come out in the render unless you zoom in tight on it.

The texturing on the walls and floor I thought was pretty good, but, with the DOF blurring things a little too much, it turns into a very subtle thing that's hard to notice.

You may notice one very, very special thing about the drafting table. It's a magic hovering drafting table! (Hint: I didn't have time to finish the model, but I thought I could make an excuse. :-) )

Finally, inspiration for this scene came from a picture in a wonderful old book from the dawn of computer rendering:
"Drafting Stools" by Alan Barr, Raster Technologies Inc.
[Prueitt, Melvin L. Art and the Computer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.]

Rendering platform: Imagine (IFW) 2.13 on Win98SE in VMWare 2.0 for Linux on Linux 2.2.16pre7 with 2 x 400 Celeron and 128MB RAM

All objects are original, and were modelled in Imagine.
No brushmaps used.
Rendering Time: ~10 minutes at 640x480