Robert Gatliff's Gallery

Welcome to my gallery, and enjoy the guided tour!

Glasses-V 1995 (241K, 1024x768) is a model I did a while back. It's pretty primitive, but the lenses actually work.

The sheet of graph paper in this scene illustrates my process for constructing 3-D props. First, I start with an ideal and do a sketch, trying to figure out how to layout the shot. Secondly, I design any new props that are required like these glasses. This is usually done on graph paper, but sometimes I do it interactive at the keyboard. Thirdly, I translate this 2-D drawing into a 3-D modeling language, POV script; it's sort of like a programming language. Fourth, I render the image with POVray , a freeware raytracing program. This last step is very iterative: I render the scene, I look at the image, I tweak the scene, I render it again...until I abandon the piece.

Melts in your mind, not in your hand 1995 (190K, 1024x768) is composed of 3400 pieces of candy. Do you recognize the logo?

It took 25 hours on a Pentium/75, mostly because of the reflections between the pieces. To the right is another one with the same pieces of candy. In this case, 9200 pieces and has taken 122 hours, Candies in space... 1995 (190K, 1024x436). There's that cyclops pyramid smiley face, again.

Most of the additional rendering time was from the multi-point light source that created the soft shadows from the candy belt. I have some more work to do, illumination from the main planet body, reduce the glare, more cloudy textures, and brighten the star field.

11th Hour 1994 (39K, 640x480) is a piece inspired by my friends at Illuminati Online, the internet provider that I use. Look closely at the engraving, it's another cyclops pyramid, it's my providers logo.

The watch chain was generated with an AWK script that randomly generated the winding path. The watch face and engraving are bitmaps that were manipulated with PhotoFinish. The rest of the watch was designed by hand on graph paper, with help of an HP calculator. After I converted it to POV script, POVray spent 8 hours on a 486/66 rendering the image.

Glass-IV1994 (34K, 640x480) is a prototype for a drinking glass. Glass is expensive to render. Glass both reflects and transmits light. When light enters or leaves glass, it splits; some is absorbed, some is refracted and the rest is reflected. Every path the light takes, must be followed.

It looks simple, but this small image took 8 hours to render. The jaggies around the edges is an artifact of a low sample rate of one ray per pixel. Most of my other images I use more than one ray per pixel, and blend the results. This is called anti-aliasing, and can double the processing time.

End of the day 1995 (209K 1024x768), now with a faster computer which I keep busy at night on raytracing, this image took 48 hours to render on a Pentium/75. I added a wood grain surface to the previous two objects.

The glass in this image more than quadrupled the time to render. All of the reflection, refraction, inner reflection and re-reflecting caused a branching explosion. This was then anti-aliased which doubled the time, yet again. On top of all this a second light source added another 50% to the runtime. A variation of this watch is being used as the banner screen to a timesheet product.

3D candy 1994(33K, 640x480) was the result of an argument that turned into a test of whether I still remembered my Trigonometry in 3-D.

Dragons scales-IV 1995(84K, 1024x768) was an experiment to create scales, and tile them. Ultimately, I'll build a whole dragon, mean and metalic green. You could say this is a bottom up design. : - )

Othello match-XIV 1995(130K, 1024x768) is a work in progress. I use it as a testbed for raytracing ideals and tricks. If you look in the partial shadows, the cloth texture changes with each light source.

Othello is a game that I have more than average interest. I've created an Othello page for those who are interested in more information on this wonderful little board game.

An Earth shattering Kaboom 1994(79K, 1024x436) was inspired by Japanese Animation and comics, which I enjoy reading.

So much of their science fiction, that makes it to the U.S., end in World War III, the destruction of Tokyo, a planet, a solar system, or even a galaxy. Someday I'll add a space ship or moon to the scene. The unusual size of image was intentional; its the same as wide screen movies, 2.35 to 1.

World Peace 1995 (93K, 1024x768) is a response to those who thought "An Earth shattering Kaboom" was too violent.

It's a really a proof of concept, like a rough drawing. If I like the concept, I'll iteratively refine the image---a tweak there, a detail there... Sort of like programming. For those who are interested in the behind the scenes, peace2.pov is the POV script for rendering World Peace.

LISA-II 1993 (91K, 800x600).

Here's my contribution to nonrepresentational modern art. Notice the pastel colors slowly blend along a recursively serpentine path. Actually its the product of a programming bug that looked pretty good, so I had to call it a feature. : - ) A number of people have hard-copies from this series, hanging on their walls.

The previous piece was named after my ex-wife who is into modern artist such as Mark Rothko. To the right is an example of her own art that is in more traditional medium, water color, pastels, oil pastel, and oil.

Shades of Love 1994 (50K, 792x600) in oil.

Untitled 1998 (36K, 640x427). This piece is untitled because I want you to decide for yourself what it means. I will tell you it followed the divorce with Lisa that resulted in a burst of desire to express myself through art. Some described it as my wedding band period, since they commonly appeared in these pieces. This period also coincided with me acquiring a much faster computer that allowed me to render much larger pieces. This opened up new possiblilites for me, because I could render 100 Mbyte images and have them printed as a large poster at a local print shop. These large format pieces created much greater impact than what you can get on a 17 inch monitor.

When I need to get away from computers, I go back to the basics---pencil, paper, and pen & ink. Sometimes I give up the implements of writing and drawing, and just fold the paper into shapes.

Flapping bird 1995 is modeled after one of the earliest things I learned to fold out of paper. To learn more about the art of paper folding, visit my Origami page

If you are interested in more computer graphics and ray tracing, check out Ian Grimstead's big page of ray tracing. It points off to so many other sources, that it will keep you busy for hours. Other pages can be found through UCSC's page on computer graphics.

Back to my home page, where you can find my mail address and other interests.

Visit the Illuminati Online home page.