EMAIL: jhem_m@hotmail.com
NAME: Jhem Murray
TOPIC: Mythology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Bellerophon and the Chimaera Beast
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
WEBPAGE: http://www.jpixel.com
RENDERER USED: 3D Studio MAX default renderer
TOOLS USED: 3D Studio MAX v4
RENDER TIME: around 2 hours
HARDWARE USED: P4 3 GHz with 768 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Bellerophon was the grandson of Sisyphus. He was wrongly accused of trying to seduce the wife of King Proteus of Argos. Angrily, Proteus sent Bellerophon from his court with a letter to deliver to the King of Lycia.

The letter asked the King of Lycia to kill the person who brought it but he did not want to offend the Furies by murdering a guest. Instead, he asked Bellerophon to kill the beast called Chimaera to pay for his hospitality. The Chimaera was a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat and a serpent's tail. The king was sure Bellerophon would fail and be killed.

Athene decided to help Bellerophon. She lent him her winged horse, Pegasus, and he flew over the Chimaera and plunged his spear down its throat.

Bellerophon then helped the king by flying above his enemies and pelting them with rocks. The king could not believe the hero deserved to die after this and they became friends. Bellerophon even married his daughter.

After a while Bellerophon became too proud. He tried to fly to Olympus on Pegasus. No human was allowed in the home of the gods without an invitation, so Bellerophon had to be punished. Zeus sent a fly that drove Pegasus wild. The hero was thrown from his back and landed in a thorn bush. He was blinded and lamed, ending his life homeless and alone.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I started off by creating the models for the Chimaera Beast and Pegasus. I used spline cages which I later converted to polygons for polygonal modelling and finally smoothed out with MeshSmooth. For the feathers of the Pegasus, I duplicated one feather around the wingspan and then modified each feather painstakingly. I used a special plugin for the fur effects, some of the fur is lines. The cliff edge uses displacement mapping for the different bumps and cracks. The background is a matte painting I created earlier in MAX and photoshop, it uses special illustration shaders. The slight dust effect underneath the beast was created with Afterburn.  The materials for the beasts are several blend materials, mainly a color map, a bump map, in parts illustration shaders (pegasus face 10% illustration shader) and other self-illumination and translucency shaders.