EMAIL: mgleason@mac.com NAME: Michael B. Gleason TOPIC: Fortress COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: The Barrier COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: 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.