EMAIL: vmxeo@juno.com
NAME: Joshua Derr
TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Hope and Fear
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: none (at this time. sorry!)
RENDERER USED: Truespace v4.3 
TOOLS USED: Poser 4, Photoshop 5, Bryce 3, Freehand 8
RENDER TIME: Approximately 1.5 hours
HARDWARE USED: 600mhz
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Contrasting emotions. Fear, the all consuming fire from below, and hope, the delievering rain from above.  
When coming up with a idea for the competition, I almost always try to do something that I think will be 
completely different than everyone else. Sometimes it works.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

It's been over two years since I've submitted anything to the IRTC. I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback immensely....

The girl:
A poser 4 figure, with some manual surface tweaking to the face, hair, and clothes. Part of her clothes were modelled with nurbs. 
You can't tell from the picture, but the clothes have a nice weave texture/bump map using Primitive Itch's piWeave shader. 

The wall:
Nothing exciting here, essentially just a cylinder, with a sweep for the top stone work.

The columns:
Modelled by hand from a picture of a greek corinthian column. The picture was used as a base for both the texture and bump map. 
As a side note, I'm quite proud of the results...

The ground:
Oringally modeled using a single plane and a nice texture, I later traced over the texture map in freehand, exported the resulting vector graphic out,
and extruded it in Truespace. This proved to be less of a chore than I thought it would be. There is dirt underneath the stones, though you really can't 
see it. A height field was designed in Byrce, exported as a greyscale BMP, and turned back into a height field in Truespace.

The fire:
A volumetric light. It was very tricky to get just the intensity, size and falloff that I wanted.  I spent lots of time tweaking the values for it.

The rain:
A group of elongated planes with a transparency map. The splashes at the top of the wall are also planes with transparency maps.

The sky:
A very, large sphere with a cloud texture created in Byrce.