Are you tough enough to face a ...

Ray Dream Studio is such a deep and powerful program that occasionally I see an image that the artist says was done in Studio and I have a tough time understanding how he/she did it. Of course, there is always pixel editing after-the-fact, but sometimes descriptive text explains that it wasn't the case. And it is left to me to decipher the process, like a "software detective." Now you can have your chance and find out more about Ray Dream Studio in the process. Up to the challenge? Well, Okay then!

Here is the image in question. It is as simple as it first appears. Perhaps even simpler. The question is this: how did my son's face get on this sphere?

Now anyone who has spent over 5 minutes with the program can probably list a half dozen ways to get an image onto on object. But this one comes with a specific set of elements. I'll lay them out for you.

First, the "scene" is a simple one. It came from the Scene Wizard in Ray Dream Studio. It is only a camera, two lights and a slab (cube) without modifications. The specific settings are below, and unremarkable. None of these were modified, just used as-is. Starting with the PHOTO STUDIO selection in the Wizard:

Lighting is the LEFT 100%/RIGHT 30% preset. Again, this was not modified. No gels were added to the lights. No masks either. The lights are stock, as placed by the Wizard.

The slab is the GRANITE FLOOR preset. Again there was no modification.

Whatever shader was on the slab was left as-is. Just like it comes out of the Wizard.

The scene is shown below in the Time Line. It consists of two cameras, one default and one placed by the Wizard (Render Camera). Two lights, Right and Left, are linked to the camera. The cube is the "slab" discussed above. And then there is the sphere ...

And it is just a sphere. It was created with the SPHERE tool in RDS. Note that there is only a single triangle next to the name. That means that there is nothing linked to it. The green triangle, if clicked, would reveal the details about the sphere's timeline. What you see here is all there is, object wise.

There are two shaders used. Well, three if you count the shader on the slab. But I'm not.

One shader is a stock Ray Dream Studio Shader. It is called VENEER.BRW and is installed by default (at least on the Mac.) To get what you see on my image you may have to adjust the tiling a little, but it is irrelevant anyway, so don't bother.

The other shader is pictured below.

All it consists of it a default "Red" shader, with a MIX function added to the COLOR tab. It has a CHECKERS function creating a checkerboard that is black and navy blue. The exact colors are irrelevant. I chose them so it would be EASIER for you to see what was going on, not harder. (You'll just have to trust me on that.) The other panels are all the default shader values. All are just the VALUE function. That is it. No texture map or picture is used anywhere.

Well that is not QUITE accurate. One image is used. THIS one.

But it isn't used in the above shader in any way. Nor is it used in the VENEER.BRW shader. And this image is just a plain JPEG. There is no alpha channel. No path or vectors. Just a small, simple jpeg image. And nothing was done to the rendered image out of Ray Dream Studio. No post processing was done.

That is it. That is all you need to know to replicate the first image. How is it done? Could you do it? Can you venture a guess? Or are you stumped? How did my son's face get on that sphere?

Send me email at mwlewis@deltanet.com if you think you know the answer! I'll quickly tell you if you are right! I'll add the answer soon here!