EMAIL: libelle@webbwerks.com
NAME: Samuel J. Goldstein
TOPIC: Science Fiction
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
RENDERER USED: Strata StudioPro/Blitz 1.75+ Raytracer
TOOLS USED: Strata StudioPro/Blitz 1.75+ Modeller, Form*Z Modeller, Adobe
Photoshop 3.0.5,
RENDER TIME: 16 minutes and 17 seconds
HARDWARE USED: PowerMac 8500/120 with 48M RAM, 280M Virtual RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Micro-Surgery. In the future, we'll combat viruses by injecting swarms of
microscopic robots into the blood stream. They'll be fast enough to avoid
the body's own defenses. They'll be equipped with implements of destruction
to render viruses harmless.
Their primary mode of attack will be to damage the protein packets (coat
proteins) that line the viral invaders and that enable the the viruses
to connect to and attack the body's cells. Once the virus is rendered
inactive, the body's natural immune system (primarily the T-cells) will
mop up what's left.

This scene shows a small force of microscopic robots attacking a virus.
(Like many viruses, this one has a basically icosahedral structure, although
it's hard to recognise from the view in the picture. The arms that spiral
off of each face of the icosahedron are the coat proteins.)

I may have some of the micro-bio wrong. Damn it Jim, I'm a Web-designer,
not a doctor!

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The Virus itself was modelled with a co-worker's copy of Form*Z. It
consists of 20 helices, each one emerging at an angle from its
specific face of an icosahedron. Form*Z makes modelling something like
this almost trivially easy. This is just a hobby, but if I could justify
the expense, I'd buy Form*Z in a minute! 

The rest of the scene was modelled in Strata Studio Pro/Blitz.

The techniques used were all quite straight-forward except for:

- the bubble streams. I tried actually modelling bubbles using spheres,
  and it was not only incredibly slow, but didn't look very good. The
  fact that they refracted correctly (using the assumption that blood
  has an index of refraction roughly of a 20% water/sugar solution, or
  IR 1.36) didn't redeem them. So I cheated. The current bubbles are
  bump-mapped and transparency-mapped dots on a big triangle.

- The saw blades are an image-map and a matching transparency map on
  a very short cylinder. Again, when I actually modelled the saw blade,
  it generated an outrageous number of polygons, and didn't look half as
  good as the final saw blade. As a friend who does CGI professionally
  told me, production computer graphics are all about cheating.

All of the textures and objects are original, and were created in
October for this competition.

I'd be happy to share the model file with anyone who requests it. It's
about a meg and a half.
___Samuel___