TITLE: Sword in Stone NAME: Brian White COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: white@rational.com TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: bawsword.jpg RENDERER USED: Lightwave 6.5b TOOLS USED: Lightwave 6.5b RENDER TIME: 20 minutes HARDWARE USED: PII, 128MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: In one legend, Arthur son of Uther Pendragon drew Excalibar from where it had been locked in a stone. In another, he attempted to wield supreme executive power because some watery tart threw it at him. You decide... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image was a good next step in my learning Lightwave. Everything, except the background, was modeled from scratch. The sword is based on a tutorial found in "Applied Lightwave 3D". I spent a lot of time tweaking the textures. The idea for the clover came from Flemming's, "Advanced 3D Photorealism Techniques". The book discussed creating a tilable, low-polygon count clover patch. I wanted loosely clustered clovers on a rock. I created a single clover cluster of four leaves and stem, then created the rock. I selected the points on top of the rock object, cut them and pasted them into a new object. Then selected a random, subset of these points. A tool I found hidden in Lightwave is called point-clone-plus. This tool allows you to duplicate an object whereever there are points in a background layer (one object per point). You can also randomly scale and rotate these duplicates in the same step. Once done, this gave me a random patch of clovers that sat perfectly on top of the rock object. The background is a digital photograph of the blue gum forest near Syndey Australia, that I took while backpacking (a.ka. bushwalking). I fully intended to replace this with actual 3D models, but time failed me. Matching the lighting between model and background proved to be a bit of a challange, but I like the result.