TITLE: Mona's Garden
NAME: Martin Glaude
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: martin@simaltech.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.bluexsoftware.com/
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mgarden.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3DS Max 4

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop for textures and format conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    9 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 256 RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Last Days of Summer in Mona's Garden

The skies are grey
And the flagstones feel cold
 to my bare feet.

The leaves still cling
To green tints and summer scents
 lightly linger.

Lock up the tools.
A trowel and rake cannot
 fight the winter.

---

Mona's garden is a haven, an eden in the midst of a rocky Northern Ontario
mining town.  Whether we're just playing with the Tibetan Spaniels or lighting
the Beltaine fires, it's a comforting bit of peace in an otherwise busy world. 
It's a spectacular landscape set in a small backyard.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Some of the plants were taken from 3dplants.com's wondeful resources.

This was my most ambitious work yet.  I wanted to push the limits of my machine
and design a larger and more detailed scene than my previous two entries.

I automated a lot of the process by scripting the generation/placement of
certain entities.  The fencing and the grass poking up between the flagstones
are snapshots of an object's path along a spline.

Nearly all of the complex object live in external files and were placed using
simple proxies.  By the end of the project, I had a total of 69 files in my
work directory but 3DS still had problems staying responsive.

The scene is a replica of a real place, and I was pretty picky about being
accurate.  So, yes, the fence angles are supposed to be all weird.  :)