TITLE: The Barrier
NAME: Michael B. Gleason
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mgleason@mac.com
TOPIC: Fortress
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: barrier.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Strata

TOOLS USED: 
    Strata Studio Pro; Photoshop (for textures, export to jpeg)

RENDER TIME: 
    about 40 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Powermac G4 - 350 mhz - 128 megs of RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

"The Barrier" -I've always wanted to enter this
competition, but don't have a lot of time to devote to personal work.The
image is a conceptual view of spermatozoa in the vaginal canal heading
towards the cervix. The cervix is just one obstacle in the path of the
sperm cells and it looms large on the horizon. The sperm cells are
intentionally not to scale (They'd really be much smaller) for effect.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All the models are relatively
simple shapes that were lathed from spline profiles and modified
slightly (squashed slightly in the vertical axis, for example). The
exception is the sperm tails - they're skinned circles.  The textures,
lighting, and camera angle are what makes this image work (for
me). There is an extreme bump on the vaginal canal wall to get the
ridges. The low camera angle helps hide the fact that the fluid doesn't
follow the curvy shape along this wall. I could have used the same bump
map as a true displacement shader, but this would have extended the
rendering time. Since I liked the camera angle, I realized I didn't need
a displacement shader.