EMAIL: agage@csee.usf.edu NAME: Aaron Gage TOPIC: Ruins COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Morning COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.csee.usf.edu/~agage RENDERER USED: Lightwave 5.6 TOOLS USED: ImageMagick to convert to JPEG, the GIMP for a noise clipmap RENDER TIME: 25 hours HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 600, 128MB RAM VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Relatively dark, at least in the shadow regions IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The sun has just risen above the horizon, warming what remains of an old dwelling. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image was done totally within Lightwave. Below, I will describe briefly how the wall, tree, and grass were made. There are 54 or so different models of rocks, each of which was made in Modeller (starting with a roughly cubic block, and using MetaNURBS to deform it while keeping it smooth). Once converted back to a triangle mesh, the points were jittered along their normals a small amount to give the rock a rough look. I placed a total of 140+ rocks by hand to create the wall, choosing from the 54 models randomly and transforming them until they would fit. The moss between the rocks was made by first placing a number of boxes into Layout in order to get the general shape of the wall, then using these in Modeller as a background while I made a MetaNURBS object of the same shape. This allowed me to fill in any gaps in the wall without making the moss/mortar look flat. The tree is largely off-camera, but it was made using tips found at flay.com. I started with a cone that was tapered to the right shape, then removed the topmost segments. These were copied into different layers, then deformed a bit and merged together on the trunk. This process was repeated many (many many) times until there were adequate branches. The splits on some of the lower branches were also edited to make them more realistic than two cones intersecting. For leaves, I started with the points at the ends of each branch, and tried using these as the centers of spheres (of leaves). This worked fairly well, but ended up creating far too many polygons. I ended up using the resulting shape as a guide for making a simpler MetaNURBS leaf object. Once I had roughly the right volume, I jittered the points dramatically (which had a very interesting effect), then textured the object to the color of leaves, and applied a Vein clipmap. I tried using a transparency map instead of the clipmap, but Steamer would not work well this way. The grass was inspired by some discussion on a Lightwave newsgroup, and was done by a method they were calling Pancake Voxels. It basically works like this: take many layers of polygons (in this case, the shape of the ground, for a total of 20 layers) that are separated by a very small distance (1mm in this case). Apply a planar clipmap of some sort (in this case, from above, using a fractal noise pattern). The result? It is as though this volume of polygons has had thousands of holes poked through it, leaving behind what looks deceptively like grass. It requires very few extra polygons, and makes for a decent effect. The weeds and fern were created in Modeller, mostly through trial and error. The hills were made by taking a large plane, subdividing the areas that would be on-camera, and applying a jitter along the point normals until I got what I wanted. The mushrooms were also fairly easy to model, but ended up being largely hidden. The fog was provided by Steamer, and the sky by SkyTracer. All textures were original. While I am generally pleased with this image, there are still some areas that could use work (or at least some extra details). I like the grass effect, but would like to find a way to make it stand out in 3D better. As it stands, this scene contains 222 objects made of 182571 points connected into 217844 polygons.