EMAIL: white@rational.com
NAME: Brian White
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Medusa's Lair
COUNTRY: USA 
RENDERER USED: Bryce 4
TOOLS USED: Bryce 4, Poser 4, Plant Studio, Tree Druid
RENDER TIME: 1hr 56min
HARDWARE USED: Pentium III (128Mb RAM)
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  
My initial efforts on this topic were discarded once I hit upon this question:  "What happened to the lair of the Medusa after she was killed?"  I started thinking about things like, did she arrange her stone victims in a way that pleased her or did she leave them where they stood?  The scene shows the entrance to her mountain lair in the early morning with the sun rising and a misty fog still clinging to the land.  The figures are frozen in their last acts of bravery or fear.  A snake shows that evil still lurks amoungst the decay awaiting a chance to return.  
 
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I was looking to produce an image that met three criteria: photorealism, creative interpertion of the topic, and
one that invoked an emotional response.  You'll have to tell me whether I succeeded.

The Figures...
This was my first use of Poser and I enjoyed creating the figures.  Each figure was posed using the default nude man as its basis, exported to DXF format, and imported into Bryce for placement.  The closest figure is only a bust.  The third figure in the background had multiple parts removed to simulate a statue falling apart.  All texturing for the entire image is done using procedural textures which I find more satisfying to use than bitmaps from scanned images.

The Vines...
The vines on the first and second figure were created using a technique I learned from an article by William Munns in Issue #38 of 3DArtist.  Briefly, Bryce offers a render mode called altitude where the highest parts of a scene are rendered in white, lowest in black, and grey scale in between.  By laying an object down flat and rendering from the top, you can create a gray scale bitmap that can be used as a terrian map (height field).  Using Bryces terrain editor, you then hand draw the vines onto the terrian created from this bitmap.  Then by repositioning the vines terrain object over the actual figure object it gives the appearance of the vines wrapping around the figure.  The leaves for the vines up close were created in Plant Studio, imported into Bryce for duplication, resizing and texturing.  I enjoyed adding the spots to the vine leaves to given them a sickly feel.

The Snake...
The snake head is from Poser.  The body is a torus object cut with a negative cube all created in Bryce.  The texture was created using Bryce's deep texture editor.  The bump map I used for the scales was found on the web somewhere I can't remember. 

The Tree...
The tree was created with Tree Druid.  The folliage is made up of two Bryce terrain objects angled toward the camera along with a procedural texture that has quite a bit of transparency.    In other words, you couldn't animate this scene.  The folliage looks right only from the camera view.  The bark texture is also prodedural created in Bryce.  The nice look of this texture on the trunk is pure luck!  Another terrain was created around the tree base to give it a mossy look.

Other details:
The background is a giant terrain.  It is as if you were looking at a hollow mountain from the bottom.  The idea was to create a cave entrance, but no mater how I sized it this didn't quite happen.  The mist / fog are two giant spheres with a stock cloud texture applied.  A mild amount of haze was used to increase the sense of depth.