TITLE: Anfractuous Descent
NAME: Matthew Reimer
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: mreimer@impossibility.org
WEBPAGE: http://impossibility.org
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: anfractu.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Vue D'esprit

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhino, UV mapper, Photoshop (textures only),

RENDER TIME: 
    time your image took to render

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 1.70 GHZ 512 RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Anfractuous: (a.) Winding; full of windings and turnings; sinuous; tortuous; as,
the anfractuous spires of a born.

I hope there aren't eny psychologists among the viewing audience or I'm likely
to get commited for this. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This image was loads of fun to do. The most technically challenging part was
getting all the impossible objects to look right.

I started by picking a cool word out of the dictionary: "Anfractuous" meaning
winding or tortuous. Then I just sat with a sketchbook and drew some lines
until objects sort of took shape. Not all the ideas I came up with ended up on
paper due to their technical feasibility.  I wanted to get something that, at a
glance would be full of familiar objects but on closer inspection would reveal
impossibility and a completely twisted perspective.

I really wanted to be as strict about the rules as possible so the only
photoshop I used was in creation of the textures; Every single texture in this
scene was created from scratch. 

The mouth, slide, Teeth, Tongue and tap were modeled in rhino. At first I had a
very normal looking spiral slide but after a while I decided that it wasn't
winding or tortuous enough and came up with a more distorted shape. The whole
shape is in fact one big loft that starts at the tongue base and winds its way
right up to the very top of the slide. For the mouth I downloaded a picture of
somebody screaming off the internet and used that as my guide while modeling.

The two impossible obejects, if you haven't picked them out alredy are the
structure with pillars and the water pipe that goes behind the mountain. The
pipe was easy, I just used a boolean object to cut it so that the edge matched
up with the mountain edge from the camera's point of view. The structure with
the pillars was much more difficult and it involved fading textures and
perspective-challenged placement of all the objects. I was quite pleased with
the outcome and I look forward to trying more impossible objects in the future.


The water (both the spray behind the hands and the fall into the mouth) was
created by using landscapes with a water texture. I was absolutely blown away
by how well this technique works and I think it's the most photorealistic
effect in this scene. 

I'm not going to post the source file since it's just too huge but if anyone is
interested in it I think we could arrange something.