TITLE: The Long Flight Home
NAME: Trevor Vass
COUNTRY: United States of America
EMAIL: uvasst00@mcl.ucsb.edu
TOPIC: Flight
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: flgthome.jpg
RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Release 3
TOOLS USED: Paint Shop Pro 4.0, Universe 1.0, Vistapro 3.1
RENDER TIME: 37 minutes, 1 second
HARDWARE USED: AMD K5-100, 32 Mb RAM
IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
        After a long afternoon of patrols, a squadron of American P-51'
s head home.
        I was trying to capture the beauty of the ocean at night as the
the moon's rays cascade upon the waves of the sea. I often stand beside
my dorm room window and gaze out upon the beautiful Santa Barbara, Cali
fornia coastline, which was the inspiration for this image.
        This image is best viewed with all the lights off (and at night
if possible) so you can catch the darker hues of the picture in contras
t with the white light of the moon (increasing the contrast of this pict
ure and fiddling with the brightness only ruined the effect of the moonl
ight so I left it on the dark side).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
        The texture maps in this image were created with Paint Shop Pro
using a two step process I saw used in last month's competition. First
an alpha rendering of each individual object to be textured must be cre
ated. Then in Paint Shop Pro I painted on this black and white template
image to create my bump, and texture maps. Then I went back into 3DS an
d applied mapping coordinates to each object individually by simply set
ting the mapping planes dimensions to 'bitmap fit' and then scaling the
 mapping plane to fit the size of my orthognal view window, which is zo
omed to fit the current object having the texture applied.
        The background was created using several different programs. Fir
st to generate the waves and the islands, I used Vistapro to generate a 
fractal island with the 'fractalize' setting to 2. Then I saved the text
ure created by Vistapro as a targa file, and also saved the landscape cr
eated by Vistapro as a .DXF file. Then I went into to Paint Shop Pro and
edited the base texture created by Vistapro to create a less pixalated a
nd more detailed texture for the ocean and islands. Then after all of th
is was done I brought the .DXF file into 3DS and created a texture for t
he object using the manipulated targa file I created earlier with Paint 
Shop Pro.
        With the oceans and islands prepared I used Universe to to gener
ate a star field for the background, and then I created a simple sphere
for the moon, and used a mooncrater texture supplied on the CD-ROM acco
mpanying the book 'Inside 3D Studio Release 3', written by Steven Ellio
t, Phillip Miller, and Gregory Pyros, and published by New Riders Publis
hing. I made the texture have a self-illuminace of 10 percent and a bump
factor of 5 percent. Then I mapped the texture to the sphere using cylin
drical mapping coordinates, and set the position of the moon relative to
the ocean.
        For the lighting of the scene I set the ambient light to a light
blue and then created a spot light of grey light with an intensity of ap
proximately 120 (but I can't remember for sure), and then fiddled with t
he falloff and hotspot attributes of the light until I recieved the desi
red shiny effect off of the ocean (the ocean had a shinyness of 80 perce
nt with an intensity of around 50 percent).
        With the background finally finished I set the P-51's in formati
on, and used the starfield as the background of the scene and rendered a
way to produce the final image.
        Source art for this image (P-51 images, and color schemes) are c
ourtesy of the manuals from Aces Over Europe, and Aces of the Pacific (t
wo computer flight simulators by Dynamix Software) which contains excell
ent photographs of World War II era aircraft from the National Air and S
pace Museum.
        If anyone has any questions about this image, or about how it was
created, (or even if you'd just like to chat with another 3D Artist) send
me some e-mail at the above address.