CLipka:

"Chess And Checkers: The Way to Mastership" is a 1918 introduction to two popular board games - yet at the same time it might be a history of computer 3D art, still being written right now and here: Are not chess pieces and checkered planes the very roots and hallmark of our trade, and the very starting point of the road which to travel we have set our minds on: The Way to Mastership?

This Way to Mastership has always been the art of trade-offs, sacrificing speed for precision and precision for speed; a trade-off we find paralleled in chess, by the sacrifice of pieces for an advantage in development speed, and development speed for an advantage of pieces.

Sometimes we find success to be the result of doing the unexpected, the unthinkably radical. Just as Adolf Anderssen did in his infamous "Immortal Game" on 21 June 1851, when he beat Lionel Kieseritzky by sacrificing a bishop, both rooks and ultimately his queen, only to checkmate his opponent at an incredible pace with his three remaining minor pieces.

The image depicts the situation after Anderssen's 22. move, Qf6+, right before Kierseritzky's knight moves to strike: Nxf6.

We did our best to Master our goal of showing the long Way 3D computer graphics has come already since the first chrome spheres and Chess pieces on a Checkered plane - whether it be ray tracing with its stunningly realistic effects, rasterization with its unparalleled speed, or yet another approach. And just as in chess, we face a new challenge every time we set out and start modeling another scene, moving further on our never ending way - the Way to Mastership.

NoClip:

Tina Chep was captured and enslaved by her arch-enemy the Plane Checker, doomed to roam 8x8 cells until the end of her lifetime... Yet her hope would be the last to die. Later than herself, at least... This was definitely not the best of all worlds to live in, and every potential way out was worth a try...

To escape the world, she decided to cast the checkering effect in the image itself using two different 3D rendering tools.

In the image plane, one square is raytraced and one square is rasterized. If one wants to render a chrome sphere on a checkered plane, then raytracing is best because one simply needs to trace back the reflected rays. But using rasterization, it is very difficult to achieve such an easy result.

However, Tina Chep chose to use also rasterization for rendering her last checkered image. Why? because This Is Not A chrome-sphere-on-a-CHEckered-Plane competition!

When the game starts, Tina Chep is side by side nearby the King. The strategy for her is to win the game for the king as fast as possible, BUT, at the very last moment, she must quit the checkered world. How did she do it?

1. e4 e5 
2. f4 exf4 
3. Bc4 Qh4+?! 
4. Kf1 b5?! 
5. Bxb5 Nf6 
6. Nf3 Qh6 
7. d3 Nh5 
8. Nh4 Qg5 
9. Nf5 c6 
10. g4 Nf6 
11. Rg1! cxb5? 
12. h4! Qg6 
13. h5 Qg5 
14. Qf3 Ng8 
15. Bxf4 Qf6 
16. Nc3 Bc5 
17. Nd5!? Qxb2 
18. Bd6! Bxg1? 
19. e5! Qxa1+ 
20. Ke2 Na6 
21. Nxg7+ Kd8 
22. Qf6+! Nxf6 
23. Be7# 1-0

One of the key moves was

19. e5!

"This sacrifices yet another White rook. More importantly, this move blocks the Queen (A1) from participating in the defense of her king, and threatening mate in 2: 19. Nxg7+ Kd8 20. Bc7#."

The game ended with the bishop move, after the queen had vanished at the 22nd move... when she had been caught by the out-of-the-checkered-world fire of the knight.

Caught? The 22nd move?

"Catch-22 is a term that is confusing and difficult to describe. In short, its basic meaning is that if there was a rule, no matter what the rule is, there is always an exception to it. It is a mysterious regulation that is in essence a circular argument... It creates situations where, when you think everything is perfect, Catch-22 pops up and makes your plans impossible."

A checkered plan, or... planE, so to speak...

The fire of the 22nd move (catching the queen) is the exception of the checkered rule, therefore the Catch-22 of the infamous Plane Checker.

_________________________

"Immortal Game" also reminds us of Michael Moorcock's "Eternal Champion"...

"The Eternal Champion, a Hero who exists in all dimensions, times and worlds, is the one who is chosen by fate to fight for the Balance"

The Eternal Tina Chep must leave the checkered world by sacrificing speed for precision and precision for speed. Using chess playing first, but also using 3D rendering tools afterwards. Even though she goes out of the 8x8 board, she would still be stuck in the image plane checkering! How can she do it before time runs out?

She must free herself also from this 2D prison, by finding a WAY to another dimension.

Self-sacrifice as a way out of a world...

... a world you don't belong into. Like a flesh & blood character among a bunch of wooden, marble, plastic and chrome minions of the Plane Checker.

This picture was a real technical challenge: How to combine multiple different approaches at 3D rendering in one single shot? Our first opening moves date back to the beginning of October, when the "20'000 Leagues" challenge was still open for submissions and "Chess and Checkers" was just one candidate among others for this round's topic, yet we only barely managed to keep free from serious Zeitnot, and there were times when both of us were worried about it.

The most crucial thing was to keep our geometry synchronized - not an easy task, using the PoV-ray raytracer with its Scene Description Language on one end and an OpenGL-based, visually oriented application on the other, and various model sources including Poser.

Most modeling work was therefore done in Wings 3D, and the resulting meshes exported to both PoV-ray and 3DS format. The only exception was the white queen - which was exported to 3DS directly from Poser, and via PoseRay to PoV-ray formaty - and the crown and dagger which were imported into Poser as props for the queen first, and subsequently handled as parts of the queen model.

Many textures are just UV-mapped 2D images; for a few of the textures, however, we decided to go for PoV-ray procedural textures though (most notably the marble chess pieces). To get exactly the same texture on the rasterization side, we created a small C# application that would take an .obj mesh with UV co- ordinates, and generate a PoV-ray orthographic scene file that would create a corresponding 2D texture bitmap from any PoV-ray texture. A bit of Photoshop post- processing was done to smoothen the seams. The other 2D textures mostly involve Photoshop work, too. The chrome sphere on a checkered plane displayed on the monitor was of course specially designed for this scene and rendered using PoV- ray. The only completely unmodified texture is the HDRI background - a freely available light probe image - in the raytraced parts of the scene (for the rasterization parts, it had to be cropped to the visible area, scaled down and converted to JPEG because of memory constraints).

We decided to mix both the raytraced and rasterized images using a checkered pattern, to best match the topic. Mixing was done in the OpenGL application as part of the rasterization rendering process. We needed real-time re-rendering to synchronized both images.

The fire effect was another challenge - not so much how to do it in PoV-ray, but what to do in this area in the rasterized portions. We ultimately hid the effect from the raytraced shot as well (using no_image, so that we still got the radiosity and reflections), and instead blended it in later over the whole shot. For this purpose, we did two extra shots including only the absorbing and emitting components, respectively, of the effect, which we then overlayed accordingly using Photoshop (we believe this constitutes fair use; in fact an attempt to do this in the OpenGL application proved too difficult, but we actually set up a PoV-ray orthographic scene that was able to do exactly the same, before finally deciding to spare us this extra processing step and instead combine it with the usual image finalization, like brightness/contrast and file conversion work.)

The raytraced version of the scene uses purely radiosity-based lighting from a HDRI light probe background with highlights created using reflection and micro- normals, except for a few pieces that intentionally use PoV-ray's classic specular highlighting instead. To get the best out of the micronormals with the available multi-core computer, the main render was done 8 times with different jitter, and the resulting shots overlaid in Photoshop.

The radiosity pre-render took about 12 hours, using 25% of an AMD Phenom X4 9640 2.3 GHz with 4.0 GB RAM; The eight main renders, run in two batches, kept the same system maxed out (both CPU and RAM) for another 21 hours in total. The fire effect took about an hour on a P4 3.4 GHz. OpenGL processing time required to produce the rasterized shot on a Macintosh Core 2 Duo with RadeonX 1600 was not measured, but minimal in comparison.