Vanitas

…. somebody should clean up there.…

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting especially associated with Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word is Latin, meaning emptiness and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. Vanitas vanitatum (Vanity of vanities) is also the title of an oratorio written by Italian Baroque composer Giacomo Carissimi (1604/1605 -1674). Common symbolic motifs in vanitas paintings include skulls, musical instruments, and flowers, all of which are associated with the passage of time, transience, and ephemerality.

[From: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

The image may seem too large to view at once on a screen, but its size is needed to show all the details contained in the scene. With an image browser you can see a scaled-down image.

Sometime in 2008 I made a first version of this scene which turned out to be much too clean to my taste. This round gave me the opportunity to revisit the scene and make the necessary transformations for a more personalized view, using new techniques and insights I have learned in-between.

The table is a height_field function made from a wood texture (DMFWood4 in Moray) appropriately mapped first. A layered texture adds the stains to the wood. The Tarot cards have been severely mishandled in PSP8 to give them a worn and stained look. Each card has its own transparency map for the ragged edges. The game shown is based on a real draw I once did for a friend. You may investigate yourself for an interpretation of the draw. The bread is a combination of a mesh2 and a height_field, originally created for the Moray Tribute collaboration project by StephenS (iirc). Poser provided the skull (Poser 8: Ryan skeleton) the crow and the flies. The skull uses the df3 proximity pattern macro by Edouard Poor. All other objects (stoneware bottle, cup, plate, knife, sausage, bread crumbs, glassball under cloth) were modelled in Silo2 and provided with uv_mapped images based on real life photos, remapped with a bit of warp where necessary. The liquid in the cup makes use of an interior {} with a fade color; it seems very dark because there is nothing to reflect as the room is in darkness. The stains are blobs with the same texture. A bit of blurring is provided by the 35mm camera macro by Edouard Poor.

Last but not least, the illumination of the scene consists of several light sources. First of all, a spotlight directly illuminating the table; a more distant and reddish light may stand for some fireplace; finally and diffusely, a bluish HDR probe shines indirectly through four slits high in the walls that stand for the room containing the scene. Light sources are area lights.

PaintShopPro 8, and IC by LILYsoft (http://www.lilysoft.org/IC/ic_index.htm), were used for work on the different image maps.