TITLE: Sleeping Serpent
NAME: Michael Scholz
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de
TOPIC: Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: serpents.jpg
ZIPFILE: serpents.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    3DStudioMax2.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop5.5 for texture preparation, copyright text and jpg-file

RENDER TIME: 
    8 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual PII400, 256MB Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A wilderness untouched by man - the serpent is sleeping. I
take this as a symbol: no evil has yet come to this place. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Modelling

The landscape in the background is a patch grid with a bit
random noise to have it more bumpy, a few particle systems
with an image motion blur make the waterfall. The snake is
done with ellipses that were lofted along a wiggly spline.
Plants are simple rectangular planes with opacity mapping,
the trees are cylinders with some tweaking at their bases.

Texturing

I mixed and blended different stone bitmaps with noisemaps
and gradients to texture and bumpmap the rocks. The water-
surface bumpmap is a blend between a circular wave pattern
in the foreground and a noise pattern where the waterfalls
come down, so the waves are rougher in the back. I painted
the opacity maps for the plants, you can have them from my
zip-file. The stone bitmaps I've edited a bit in Photoshop
to make them seamlessly tileable; that made them much more
better to use. If you want to know how to do this mail me.

Lighting

Until nearly the end it seemed as if I would need only one
single light as sun, which was very astounding as I mostly
end up with dozens of lights in my scenes. There are about
five lights in the scene now: a projecting lightsource for
casting some random noise map shadows onto the trees and a
few lightscources for the area around the snake and stone.

Atmosphere

There is a volume light casting a sunbeam onto the serpent
and atmospheric combustion things as waterfall steamcloud.