EMAIL: agage@csee.usf.edu
NAME: Aaron Gage
TOPIC: The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Necromancy
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.csee.usf.edu/~agage/
RENDERER USED: Lightwave 5.6
TOOLS USED: The GIMP, Photoshop, Cyberware scanner
RENDER TIME: About 4 hours
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 600, 128MB RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A specter of the departed is momentarily brought back to the living world.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

First off, all of the lighting in this scene comes from the candles
and glowing face, though there is a small amount of ambient light.
This image may appear too dark on older monitors; the only areas that
should be in deep shadow should be at the very bottom and center right.
If it is too dark, try viewing with the lights off, or look away from
the bright cloud until your eyes adapt.  Also, the image should be
viewed on a 24-bit display -- anything less, and there will be
banding in various places.

There are more than 50 objects in this scene, and over 200K polygons.  The
more interesting ones will be described here.

The glassware (test tubes, flasks, jar) was all modeled from scratch in
the Lightwave Modeler.  The candles were also made from scratch, based
on the "Lightwave by Candlelight" tutorial (the site seems to be down
now; it was at http://www.gsidigital.com/dj/Tutorials/Candle/) using
Photoshop to make image maps.  The candle holders were also modeled from
scratch.  The scrolls were modeled starting from a thin, flat mesh that
was made uneven with successive jitter operations then rolled up by
successively rotating the ends back into themselves.  The text was
a simple texture map made with the GIMP.

The glowing flask was made by generating a large number of points
in Lightwave's Modeler, cutting away those that were outside of the flask,
turning them into polygons, setting the particle size to Large,
and adding a glow effect.  The cloud was made using Particle Storm Lite
with Steamer.  The heads are based on polygon meshes generated from
3D scans of a real person; the one in the jar uses a modified texture
map of the real thing, and the glowing head simply has a colored glow
and transparency with refraction.

The signature was done by producing an image map in the GIMP with text
in the lower right corner (20% Grey letters on black) and using
Lightwave's Watermark plugin to blend it in.

The included zip file has a number of object files and surfaces.  Not
enough to reproduce this work, but apart from the head and particle
data, just about everything is included.  Also included is a PNG
version of the image.