EMAIL : olivier.saraja@free.fr
NAME : SARAJA Olivier
TOPIC : Contrast
COPYRIGHT : I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
TITLE : "Elemental entity unleashed"
COUNTRY : France
WEBPAGE : http://saraja.multimania.com/divers/blender.htm
          http://www.blender-cafe.org
RENDERER USED : Blender v2.04
TOOLS USED : Gimp for the textures, Poser 3.0 for the naked she-giant
RENDER TIME : around 3'30" minutes
HARDWARE USED : AMD K6 2 350 MHz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION : In a nordic fjord, a newly erupted volcano releases a
female fire-giant that goes her way through the world, not noticing the
wreckage she brings along her path.
     Briefly : the constrast topic is represented through many ways in this
scene. There's of course the snow/ice opposition to the fire/volcano/lava. More
interesting, there's also the giant sized/human sized opposition, that proves
amusing to play with. Light and shadows form their very own contrast stuff, but
they are not relevant for the concept in this case, as there's no
light/darkness pair featured here.
DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED :
     It was my first attempt ever to render snowy objects. I modeled the
landscape according to a tutorial I wrote for http://www.blender-cafe.org.
Snow was obtained by the use of appropriate plain material color, bump maps
for the terrain, and the noise texture plugin outputed to the reflection
channel.
     Every object in the scene (except for the she-giant) take part on the
World Ambiant color. Using ambiant color can enhance by 100% the feeling/mood
of a scene (here, the blue mood suggests frost and cold).
     In this scene (where there are lots of steam, smoke, fire, lavafire at
the bootom of volcano and lava burst at its top), I made extensive use of
Blender particles systems (there's also a tutorial about this that I wrote on
http://www.blender-cafe.org) to generate all the fires. However, the steam
(under the feet of the she-giant) and the smoke of the volcano are not
particles, but halo meshes with proper halo properties set. The advantage is
that the rendering process is speed up.
      The sky is rendered by using a typical sky picture that has been
heavily tweaked in the World buttons options : I added a blending with a dark
brown zenith color and a light orange horizon color, and I blended the result
with my sky picture with an alpha setting for it. The result is this
good-looking luminescent lightly clouded sky ! I proceduraly added stars from
the World buttons setting.
     The she-giant is a Poser imported model. It was nude, and I patiently
dressed it, piece by piece, with torques, bracers and jewellery, all with its
own texturing. The veils have cloth-like textures set to transparency,
explaining the effect achieved. I first used a pre-built sword model from
http://centralsource.com/blender, only to see the effect of such a prop, but I
kept it 'as is' because I got lazy and wouldn't model my own.
       The she-giant footprints in the snow have been modelled, because I
couldn't achieve convincing effects with a mere bump map. Alas, they didn't
showed well, and even if they were present, they were almost invisible from
this angle view, so I had to force the perspective a bit (in fact, the
footstepd are not on the more realistic/logical location/spreading, but that
doesn't matter, hey !).
      The trees are DXF models generated using the LParser recursivity
algorithm.
       The lava burst of the volcano are two different sets of static
particles, as opposed to the dynamic particles used for the different fires.
      Shadows seem complex, but it's because there are many light sources
in this scene. The volcano generated its own light, and there's many hemi
lights with low Energy values across the scene. There's one big Spot for
generating the main shadows (it emulates the presence of a bright moon) with
medium shadow Energy value, and many little spots for the derived shadows (low
Energy values) set on the location of the fire particles emitters. Most of the
shadows blend such a way it's sometime hard to be sure they are here or either
accurate. Setting the shadows a satisfying way was among the real big jobs of
the scene, before modelling ! The mood is that of a night scene, which is
always more subtle and difficult to render.
     The artist name is typically a mesh object, set near the camera.
     This is a fantasy scene, with a fantasy setting and lighting. The color
tones are closer to be toon-like than photorealistic-like. It was intended,
and it's why the scene is very colorful even with its basic motto : snow
everywhere !      
Best Regards,
Olivier