EMAIL: luisvaloyes@malditasea.zzn.com NAME: Luis Valoyes TOPIC: The Wilderness COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: An Ancient Crater COUNTRY: Colombia WEBPAGE: http://sitio.de/luisvaloyes/ RENDERER USED: SoftCAD.3D Lite 1.16 TOOLS USED: HexaGreat-3D 5.25, SoftCAD.3D Lite 1.16 (both freeware), Corel Photo House 1.0 RENDER TIME: 37 min. HARDWARE USED: AMD K6 MMX, 32 Mb RAM, running Windows 98 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image presents an interior view of an ancient crater which has became a small lagoon that is now the home of various creatures like the two fishes in the image. It shows that those environments that the human being avoid can be perfect for other creatures and that life is stronger than everything else. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image is my first "artistic" 3d work, and it's very simple really. The final scene contains only five(5) different objects with just a few polygons each one, so it didn't take a long time to render. 1. OBJECT MODELLING: The 3 stones and the 2 fishes were modelled using HexaGreat-3D, drawing each model polygon-by-polygon, it took just 1 and 1/2 or 2 hours to draw all the models, I even modelled 4 or 5 more objects that I finally did not use. Then I exported the models as .dxf files. 2. SCENE COMPOSITION: The scene was created using SoftCAD.3D. All the .dxf models were imported as library objects, and I assigned textures to each one. The crater was modelled by placing together various copies of the same big stone. The floor of the crater was made simply drawing a square and assingning it a texture. After that I placed the other two kinds of stones on the floor, even placing one over another trying to have some stones that were half over the water level. The red fish was placed right over the floor, and the other one was placed over a box that I deleted after, so they swim at different deeps. The water is just a box with a water texture which is 65% transparent. The sun position was adjusted to get the reflection effect on the water. I expected that the fishes had any reflection too but the water was not transparent enough. I also placed some stones over the surfaces of those that formed the crater because it was very obvious that it was the same stone over and over again. 3. RAYTRACING: The image was generated by the SoftCAD.3D built-in raytracer, using 90° smoothing and 24 bit anti-aliasing. I use 16 bit color resolution and a 800 x 600 screen resolution. Whitout the water it took 15 or 16 minutes to render, so the water reflection effect added the other 21 minutes. The raytraced image was exported as a .bmp file, and I used Corel Photo House to add the title and credit, and to convert it into .jpg format. The source files include the .dxf models without any texture. I give them just to let you see how simple they are. I do not provide the complete scene because the resultant .dxf file would be really big. Note: I really do not remember the web address to download HexaGreat-3D, so if you do not find it on the net, you can e-mail me and I'll try to send it tou you, it's just a 336 Kb .zip file. / You can download SoftCAD.3D Lite 1.16 for free at: http://www.softcad.com.