EMAIL: jbrown@ananzi.co.za
NAME: John Brown
TOPIC: Dreaming
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Beyond
COUNTRY: South Africa
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: 3dsmax4
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro and three max plugins (Finalrender, SimCloth  and PaintDeform)
RENDER TIME: approx. 1 hour 20 minutes
HARDWARE USED: AMD Duron 800MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A surreal and abstract dreamscape, a dream world. A bare tree growing out of a silver disc is surrounded by a spiral staircase of stone. Strips of blue cloth hang over the staircase, separating the bleakness inside from the vibrant colours outside. A window, above a floating chessboard, looks out to the dunes and a red cloth hanging, suspended, in the air. And in the background, another window, looking further away...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I used the freeware PaintDeform plugin to create the sand dunes as the plugin allows you to paint deformations (similar to Maya Artisan) onto models. I created the stairs and used SimCloth (another freeware plugin) and manual editing to create the blue and red cloths in the scene. I applied a ripple modifier to the cylinder (under the tree) and edited it so that it would look like the cylinder is becoming the tree. The tree is an old model that I had. I used modified Max textures and procedural textures in the scene. The texture of the tree was desatured to create a greyscale look on that part of the image. A volume light effect was added to the light shining on the tree from above. Finalrender was used for GI rendering and I added a small glow using Max Video Post. I decreased the brightness and increased the contrast of the final image in PSP.