EMAIL : olivier.saraja@free.fr NAME : SARAJA Olivier TOPIC : Contrast COPYRIGHT : I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT TITLE : "Elemental entity unleashed" COUNTRY : France WEBPAGE : http://saraja.multimania.com/divers/blender.htm http://www.blender-cafe.org RENDERER USED : Blender v2.04 TOOLS USED : Gimp for the textures, Poser 3.0 for the naked she-giant RENDER TIME : around 3'30" minutes HARDWARE USED : AMD K6 2 350 MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION : In a nordic fjord, a newly erupted volcano releases a female fire-giant that goes her way through the world, not noticing the wreckage she brings along her path. Briefly : the constrast topic is represented through many ways in this scene. There's of course the snow/ice opposition to the fire/volcano/lava. More interesting, there's also the giant sized/human sized opposition, that proves amusing to play with. Light and shadows form their very own contrast stuff, but they are not relevant for the concept in this case, as there's no light/darkness pair featured here. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED : It was my first attempt ever to render snowy objects. I modeled the landscape according to a tutorial I wrote for http://www.blender-cafe.org. Snow was obtained by the use of appropriate plain material color, bump maps for the terrain, and the noise texture plugin outputed to the reflection channel. Every object in the scene (except for the she-giant) take part on the World Ambiant color. Using ambiant color can enhance by 100% the feeling/mood of a scene (here, the blue mood suggests frost and cold). In this scene (where there are lots of steam, smoke, fire, lavafire at the bootom of volcano and lava burst at its top), I made extensive use of Blender particles systems (there's also a tutorial about this that I wrote on http://www.blender-cafe.org) to generate all the fires. However, the steam (under the feet of the she-giant) and the smoke of the volcano are not particles, but halo meshes with proper halo properties set. The advantage is that the rendering process is speed up. The sky is rendered by using a typical sky picture that has been heavily tweaked in the World buttons options : I added a blending with a dark brown zenith color and a light orange horizon color, and I blended the result with my sky picture with an alpha setting for it. The result is this good-looking luminescent lightly clouded sky ! I proceduraly added stars from the World buttons setting. The she-giant is a Poser imported model. It was nude, and I patiently dressed it, piece by piece, with torques, bracers and jewellery, all with its own texturing. The veils have cloth-like textures set to transparency, explaining the effect achieved. I first used a pre-built sword model from http://centralsource.com/blender, only to see the effect of such a prop, but I kept it 'as is' because I got lazy and wouldn't model my own. The she-giant footprints in the snow have been modelled, because I couldn't achieve convincing effects with a mere bump map. Alas, they didn't showed well, and even if they were present, they were almost invisible from this angle view, so I had to force the perspective a bit (in fact, the footstepd are not on the more realistic/logical location/spreading, but that doesn't matter, hey !). The trees are DXF models generated using the LParser recursivity algorithm. The lava burst of the volcano are two different sets of static particles, as opposed to the dynamic particles used for the different fires. Shadows seem complex, but it's because there are many light sources in this scene. The volcano generated its own light, and there's many hemi lights with low Energy values across the scene. There's one big Spot for generating the main shadows (it emulates the presence of a bright moon) with medium shadow Energy value, and many little spots for the derived shadows (low Energy values) set on the location of the fire particles emitters. Most of the shadows blend such a way it's sometime hard to be sure they are here or either accurate. Setting the shadows a satisfying way was among the real big jobs of the scene, before modelling ! The mood is that of a night scene, which is always more subtle and difficult to render. The artist name is typically a mesh object, set near the camera. This is a fantasy scene, with a fantasy setting and lighting. The color tones are closer to be toon-like than photorealistic-like. It was intended, and it's why the scene is very colorful even with its basic motto : snow everywhere ! Best Regards, Olivier