EMAIL: lance.birch@usa.net
NAME: Lance Birch
TOPIC: CONTRAST
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Anastasia's Nightmare
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE: http://come.to/the.zone
RENDERER USED: 3D Studio MAX R2.5
TOOLS USED: Photoshop 5.5 (for compression to JPEG)
RENDER TIME: 14 minutes 1 second
HARDWARE USED: PIII 550 with 256 MB of RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Natural/Artificial, Life/Death, Heavens/Earth, Polluted/Clean

An oil processing and drilling station sits active in the middle of a vast hot desert under the afternoon sky.  In a place where life has been crushed by the harsh elements, only a single plant offering a lone exotic fruit bud strives to grow.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

The image was built entirely with 3D Studio MAX R2.5.  Unfortunately I didn't have the time to do what I wanted (due to school ending, suddenly getting a website design job, and lots of other stuff).  I'm entering this competition in what I believe is the spirit of the competition, that is, to have fun, and to try to help other people by sharing how I made the image.

I went for a more artistic approach with this image than I have with previous images that I've made.  Since the right hand side was very busy, I cleared the left-hand side and made it sparse, with a single fruit plant growing out of the hot soil.  The plant was box modeled, then noise was applied, and then the whole mesh was smoothed.  The sky is a huge sphere with some UVW mapping and turbulence (the sky is also 100% luminous).  The desert plane was created with a huge box with a noise modifier applied to create the "dunes".  The factory took a fair while to make, and consists of lots of cylinders, torii, spheres, star extrusions, ngon extrusions and boxes.  Everything was then hand painted using Photoshop.  The materials ended up having about five sub-layers.  The base colour layer, the painted colour layer, mixed with an oxidised metal plate image, which was then mixed with a mask to create oil stains.  On top of that there was a shininess strength mask to make sure sections that were rusted weren't shiny (which consisted of another mix map), and then a bump map on top of that!  *phew*  Some of the more strangely shaped pipes I also did side paints of in the same manner.  A lot of grit was added to the different layers to make everything a little less clean, and noise modifiers were applied to most of the geometry too so that everything wasn't so "perfect".  The "metal grids" are boxes with multiple segments, which I then made a special wire map for.  The sand was also painted!  (yes that's right I'm insane ;)  Of course I didn't paint the whole thing, I just UVW mapped the section around the factory, and painted that in Photoshop.  The painting was actually done to a mask, which was then used with the UVW map to blend the standard sand material I made with a black oil material I made.  This isn't very noticeable, but on the front-most tank you'll see the pressure outlet pipe has a stain that runs down the tank, and also out on to the ground.

The lighting was yet another nightmare.  There are several lights placed at different angles, and all with different colours.  I wanted the sand dunes a bright goldish orange, so they were exclusively lit by another light.  I also made sure that the sand dunes wouldn't cast shadows on to themselves or other objects because there were a lot of harsh brightness dropouts caused by it.  The shadows of the factory take on a rusty red colour because the factory is back lit by one of the ambient light sources for the sand dunes (since I didn't want the sand to have any completely black sections).  Because the lights were all different colours, it took a lot of time to get the factory the colour that I wanted.  I really wanted to give the entire image a surreal feeling, so I didn't want to go with standard rust colours and metal colours.  I wanted something that would, not surprisingly enough, *contrast* with everything else.

I deliberately made the top of the sky black so that the colour gradient would really stand out against the orange sand dunes, as well as to leave room for the stars that feature in the top of the image.  The stars are in the arrangement of the Southern Cross that I see all the time here, and they become the marking point for what I call the "contrast divider".  What I mean by this is that if you cover up the image left of the Southern Cross, you'll see the factory, then if you take that cover off and cover the opposite side you'll see the lone fruit plant... if you give that a go on your screen, you'll really see the contrast in the image.  I wanted to really emphasise the difference between things that were artificial and things that were natural... so all the natural things in the image have smooth shapes and clean textures, and all the artificial things in the image have dirty textures and harsh geometry.

Now, I guess I should explain the smoke and flame effects.  These were created volumetrically with FreePyro, a free plug in for MAX that creates volumetric "clouds" around each particle in a particle system.  There are only three particle systems in the scene, each with slightly different properties and volumetric effects.  Also, all the smoke and steam volumetrics cast true shadows both on to other objects, and themselves, while the flame volumetric is self-illuminated.  All the particle systems have a turbulent wind spacewarp bound to them to create the side drift that I wanted (the wide FOV of the camera also really distorts the main smoke, which I think creates a nice look).  The steam pipe particles systems were all the same particle system, but I made them come out of different pipes by creating a particle array, and using the top faces of the pipes are the distribution object.  This is because I didn't want to have to recreate the particle systems and the FreePyro settings for each of the pipes.

OK, that's a wrap, it's way too close to the deadline and I'm going down to the beach to celebrate the new year, hehe, and new millennium ;)