TITLE: Desert river
NAME: Ashton Mason
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: amason@cs.uct.ac.za
WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.uct.ac.za/~amason
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: amriver.jpg
ZIPFILE: amriver.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio MAX R2.5
JPGFILE: amriver.jpg
ZIPFILE: amriver.zip

TOOLS USED: 


  Terrain Material v2.0b2 for Max by Johnny Ow
  Unwrap 1.0 for Max by Peter Watje
  Adobe Photoshop
  Kai's Power Tools Texture Explorer for Photoshop
  RAYflect Four Seasons plugin for Photoshop
  

RENDER TIME: 
    about 20 minutes.

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 233, 128 MB RAM.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


  The idea I am trying to put across in my image is the idea
  of water giving rise to life: where there is water there is
  life and where there is none nothing lives. The intention was
  to create a strong contrast between the lush, living, fertile
  river valley and the dry, desolate desert landscape nearby.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


  I had been working for several weeks on an animated flythrough of a
  rocket though a canyon. When I saw that the current stills topic was
  water, I realised that my canyon, with a river flowing through it,
  would fit the bill. After designing a still shot with the same
  elements as the animation I spent a long time tweaking the textures,
  lighting and geometry to improve the look of the still.

  The canyon was created as a NURBS object in MAX, and was inspired by
  a tutorial in MAX 2.0 explaining the use of NURBS which used a canyon
  as an example. The basic NURBS object was formed into a canyon by
  applying noise to the tops of the canyon walls and deforming the
  length of the canyon to a twisting path. The resulting object was
  then converted to an editable mesh so that noise could be applied at
  a finer scale, then optimized to remove unnecessary polygons while
  still preserving the basic shape. Finally for the still the parts of
  the canyon that were hidden due to the camera position were
  deleted to speed up rendering. Some tearing (gaps in the landscape)
  was noticed and fixed by adjusting polygon vertices by hand.

  The canyon texture is by far the most complex texture I have ever
  created and consists of 6 submaterials and 23 maps. It was created
  with the aid of the Terrain Material plugin by Johnny Ow. This plugin
  allows for smooth blending between different materials based on
  altitude and slope, and was used to differentiate between the
  different areas of the landscape: the wet stones, the green valley,
  the steep and shallow cliffs and the surrounding desert.  Multiple
  noise bump maps at various scales were used on the cliffs and
  valley.  The desert dunes were created with a bump map created with
  KPT Texture Explorer in Photoshop, and modulated to provide variation
  with a MAX noise map.

  The river material uses raytraced maps for reflections and
  refractions and a noise map for the ripples (which are largely too
  far away to be seen). The river plantlife was created with a cellular
  map, and its placement was controlled with a texture map hand-drawn
  in Photoshop and aligned correctly with the canyon walls using Unwrap
  by Peter Watje.

  Two fog layers were used to add depth and realism, one half-filling
  the canyon and the other right near the water.  The sky is an
  environment map made with Four Seasons in Photoshop.  Two lights were
  used, one a very bright angled directional light to act as the sun,
  tinted slighly red to add a harsh hot look, and the other a dim
  vertical directional white light to fill in the shadows. The ambient
  light was given a slight bluish tint to deepen the shadows by
  contrasting with the red sunlight. The sunlight was made very bright
  to give the impression of hot bright desert sunlight.

  The birds were modelled very simply as flat cutouts (drawn as spline
  outlines and then extruded and bent) with a diffuse texture map and a
  bump map both painted by hand in Photoshop and aligned using Unwrap.
  I felt it was not worthwhile modelling the birds too precisely
  since they were too far away to be seen, and also I didn't know
  how :-)

  The unusual aspect ratio (1.66:1) was intended to remind the viewer
  of film and to break the association with 1.33:1 computer graphic
  images. For a while I experimented with an unorthodox composition
  with a large expanse of desert on the right, with the aim of drawing
  attention to the contrast between the river and the desert.  But in
  the end I decided a more traditional composition worked better
  and toned it down.

  After rendering I increased the contrast of the image in Photoshop.