TITLE: Anthill
NAME: Michael Hunter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: intertek@one.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net/
TOPIC: Architecture
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: anthill.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio Max

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio Max, SimbiontMAX, Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    10 Hours 3 Minutes (at 1280 x 1024)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 1.8 MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

At first glance, my image looks like a picture about the ancient roots of
western architecture. This is the stuff banks, libraries and courthouses
throughout the world are based on. It is traditional, proper, and timeless. But
if you look closer you will notice ants and their anthill. The ants are going
about their business without the slightest concern for the collapse of the
ancient city. Why should they care? Millions of years before the city was made
they where building their humble anthills. They made their sandy homes while
the ancient people first erected their stone walls. I suspect the ants will be
building their homes long after the last traces of mankind have turned to dust
(perhaps they will be making their architecture out of that dust).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image spent most of it's development time in my head. I took a couple of
tries at other ideas but this one kept reasserting itself as an image about
architecture rather than simply an image of architecture. As with nearly all of
the images I make, I spent lots of time on the web looking at pictures of ants
and classical columns. 

There was a difficult design problem with this image. How do you show small ants
and huge architecture at the same time? I thought about pulling the camera
right up close on the lead ant and just let the architecture be background.
Though that was very dynamic it lost the point of the image. You have to see
the architecture first then notice the ants, wonder why they are there and then
come to the conclusion that the image is about the timelessness of their
architecture and culture not about ours. I solved this problem by keeping the
little ones small but using focal blur to keep them isolated from the
background enough so that you had to eventually consider them. They are not
going away. Their voices will be heard.

Technically, I haven't really invented anything new. The only technical
challenge here is to get the lighting, textures, focal blur and models all
working together. Having a clear idea before starting the image was very
helpful. Several times I took test renderings and drew on top of them in
PhotoShop to test out ideas quickly. The focal blur added many hours to the
rendering time so I tried to get all other aspects of the image worked out
first and only tested focal blur settings in all night renderings.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this idea further please
don't hesitate to email me at intertek@one.net.