TITLE: Shared Water NAME: Stephen Lumini COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: slumini@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: N/A TOPIC: Desert COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. RENDERER USED: 3DS Max RENDER TIME: 39:25 minutes IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A mother fetches water for her family with her young son in tow. A stranger enters the Oasis... I want to mention that I am not attempting a photorealistic image. The style I am trying for is along the lines of Micheal Whelan or Alex Ross - the image is realistically portrayed (shadows, dirt, reflections, etc) but could never be confused with a photograph. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Starting top to bottom The sky is just the Enviroment set to pale blue. The palm leaves (they cast the shadows) are not visible in the picture and as such are just lines put into the right shape and extruded. I did texture them properly so that their slight reflection in the water would look ok. The trees are just two cylinders with a very small noise value and bend modifier. The real work is in the mulit layer diffuse texture and bump map. They are both procedureal - Diffuse is made up of Smoke with a sub map of Gradient Ramp. The bump is a Mix map of the above diffuse map and an Electric map with a mix amount of 15. The vine climbing the tree is a loft object. I first created the line and set the properties to Renderable and Display as Mesh - this way I could position the "path" without having to render the image after every vertex tweak. The "shape" is a simple circle. Once I created the loft, I played with the scale settings so that the vine was not uniform across it's entire length. The white flower petals are Boxes (with one Length segment and 4 width segements) - I applied an Edit Mesh and stretched the vertices into rough positions, then I applied a Mesh Smooth. Finally I added two Bend parameters, one for horizontal bend and the other the the axial bend. This is the same method used for all the flower heads. I manually placed all the white flowers. The leaves for the vine are made the same as the flower petals - I applied those to the vine using Scatter. Background sand is a simple box with alot of noise and then a meshsmooth. It has it's very own light and was excluded from the other lights in the image - the light is an omni set behind and a bit above of the highest dune, so I can get the highlight along the top of the dunes. The light strenght is set to 11. Texture info - The Diffus is Cellular with Fractal noise and Circular cells, the bump is an Instance of the Diffuse. The Boy - The headdress is a Box with only a few length and width segements - I used a few Edit Mesh modifiers to position the vertices and then Meshsmooth (I used other Edit Meshes to add cut lines). To texture it with the checker pattern, I cloned the finished headdress and removed all the Edit Mesh modifiers used to move the verrtices, leaving me with a flat box that still had all the extra lines I added. This is critical because Morph Target only works when the two objects have the exact same vertices and lines. Before using Morph Target, I applied the checker texture to the flat headress. When the Morph target deformed the box, the checker pattern followed the flow properly. I still had to tweak out some vertices to minimize the stretching. The headband is just three lines set to Renderable. The boy's face was created using two pictures of my son and following part of this tutorial http://3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp I cannot say enough great things about this tutorial. It goes through the entire steps to create a humanoid figure from clothing to head creating to adding bones for posing. It has helped me soooo much!! So getting back to the head - I used the above tutorial and basically molded/traced the images to make the head. I used the body portion of the tutorial to create the base clothing, and used the Chamfer/Cut technique mentioned in the Glove section to create the wrinkles. I also used the glove technique to make the hands. The red ornamentation on the boy's clothes are just lines with some noise and the Lattice modifier. The texture on the boy's face is a multi layer - with one layer for the skin and one layer for the lips (the lips have roughly the same texture with slightly higher specular value.) The skin texture is a Noise with a smoke and speckle sub-texture. I also added eyelashes with a pure black texture. Becasue they are so small in the picture, they are just 40 or so simple cones with a bend modifier manually placed around the eyes. The Eye texture is the only bitmap texture in the whole image. Again because of the small size they are onyl spheres and not properly made eyes. The greenery The foliage is made using two techniques - the first is creating small Quad Patches or boxes and the using Edit Patch/Mesh to roughly sculpt the objects. Once they are finished then I converted them to editable mesh and using the Compound Object called Scatter, I positioned them on the "Sand" (I use the Selected Mesh property with high Rotation values and Scale set to 90%). The trick I learned (especially for grass) is to actually make three or four different objects with slightly different properties and textures. In this image I have three "types" of grass (each with a slightly different green texture), and clover, as well as the flowers. The water is a simple box with a slightly opaque and slightly reflective texture. Additionaly, once I placed the jug, I Cut some new lines in the water around the mouth of the jug. I then lifted the edges and lowered the middle to create the effect of the water rushing in. The jug is a combination Lathe object (for the body) and a Loft object (for the handle) - as with the trees this texture it quite "deep" - basically a Gradient Ramp with a dozen shades, a Mix map, and Electric again. Lighting This is always the easiest and hardest part for me. Easy because you can create a light that only affects one object in the image and hard because you have to tweak like crazy to get it just right and I usually end up with a dozen or so lights. This image has 10 lights - one overhead (as the sun, casting shadows), one for the background sand, three on the water, and the rest are highlight lights, for example, a spotlight affecting only the trees and making the light line along the right side of the trees. A good basic lighting tutorial can be found at http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html and http://www.warpedspace.org/lightingT/part1.htm