EMAIL: intertek@one.net NAME: Michael Hunter TOPIC: Surrealism COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Still-Life with Flower COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net http://www.interactivetechnologies.net/making_of_Mystery/index.htm RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max Version 5.1 TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps), Simbiont plug-in (http://www.darksim.com/) RENDER TIME: 9 Minutes 25 seconds @ 1047 x 2000 HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 261 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I have been asked what does my picture mean. This question makes me feel a bit uncomfortable since I don't know. This time around I tried to let the image lead its own creation. When it suggested a good idea or complained about some detail I tried to listen carefully and act upon it. I didn't impose any preconceived notion of what this image was supposed to be about. But I'm sure that there is meaning behind it none the less. I would imagine ten years from today looking back at this image and knowing with great certainty what I was trying to tell myself. I only hope the message isn't too personal! My entry in the Mystery competition was an image inspired by the Surrealists. I was shocked when just days after I submitted my image I learned that the topic of this round was Surrealism! I was delighted! I figured that I had done all my research. I had learned from my mistakes. Now I was free to simply make art. But it was not as simple as I had hoped. It was hard to escape the gravity of the prior image. I was being pulled back into making the same image all over again. I needed to find a fresh idea. For the first month I did nothing but sketch out ideas. I was beginning to loose hope when a crying flower popped up in one of my sketches. The idea that a flower could cry (thus being self-watering) was to good to pass up. There stood an emotion filled plant in a barren world. It's eye raised to the heavens, it's roots stretched for freedom. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Modeling All of the models in this image were created within 3D Studio Max. Roots and stems are lofts as well as the twisty table legs. Lofts in Max allow some very handy options. You can scale the shape along the path, which I used to taper the plant stem. You can also use multiple shapes within one loft. That was very helpful for giving the main flower stem "fluting" at the base then making it smoother at the top. Also there are controls for texture mapping so no matter how twisty your loft is your texture map can follow. If you look at the table legs you'll see that they twist in the middle of the leg. That too is managed with Max's lofting controls. Most other modeling was done by tweaking control points of meshes. I usually start with a very simple mesh and apply a "Mesh Smooth" modifier. This subdivides the original mesh and smoothes the result. This often proves to be a simple way to model organic shapes because it is much easier to work with less vertices. However it is often necessary to return to the original structure to make revisions based on the results of the Mesh Smooth, or to further modify the end result of the Mesh Smooth. Max handles this very nicely. I found numerous sites with stop-motion photos of water and milk. These photos were very interesting as well as informative. These served as reference for the tears in my image. I took some liberties with physics, for example the surface tension in a drop of water causes it to maintain a spherical shape rather than tear drop when falling trough air. However a tear drop shape suggests motion better and is what people imagine a drop of falling water to look like. Since we are dealing with Surrealism these violations seem trivial. For the "crown" splashes I started with one spike (including a wedge slice of the center "bowl". When I had that exactly right and with a minimum of faces, I made nine copies of it rotating each 36 degrees and joined the copies into a completed crown shape. Each crown is part of a puddle of water. That puddle needs very little geometry - compared to the crown. So I needed to simplify the mesh at the bottom of the crown to avoid spreading the same mesh density over the entire puddle. This is a slow manual process of joining segments of the mesh together while maintaining each element in the mesh as a four-sided surface. Also each angle must be less than 180 degrees or odd wrinkles develop. The tear splash on the table (a rebound after a drop has hit the surface) was a simple lathe. All of the dripping tears started as spheres. The top half of the spheres modified to look drippy. The most challenging drip was the one coming directly from the eye. The film of water over the eye puddles up a bit at the bottom eyelid. Then at one point it overflows the eyelid and runs down over the flower petal. The shape of this trail of water had to follow the contour of the flower very closely. There is no easy way to do this. And so a lot of time was spent zoomed in to tweak then zoomed out to test render. Unfortunately all this effort is nearly invisible! Textures Most of the textures are combinations of bit maps made in PhotoShop and procedural maps. The ground, dirt in the pot, and sky are procedural with may layers each. The plant stem is covered with a bitmap for both the color and bump (or normal map). I used Dark Tree's Simbiont plug-in for the texture of the iris and rusty metal table (it's free at http://www.darksim.com/ and there are versions for a variety of applications - unfortunately not in POV-ray).