TITLE: Hot and Cold
NAME: Matthew Nohr
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mrnohr@yahoo.com
TOPIC: Opposites
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: hotcold.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

    Lightwave 8.0


TOOLS USED: 

    Lightwave 8.0


RENDER TIME: 

    1 hr 57 min


HARDWARE USED: 

    1.7 GHz AMD Athlon, 768 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


My idea of representing the opposite temperatures of hot and cold turned out to
be a little trickier than I thought.  I finally settled on a sad snowman who
find himself in the hot desert, and begins to melt.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Feel free to e-mail me if you would like more information on any of the parts of
the image, model, textures, or lighting.

After I got the model set up, I spent most of my time on tweaking the textures. 
I did not use any bitmapped textures, they are all procedural.  Making melting
snow is not very easy, but I think it turned out alright by the end with the
right combination of reflection and glossyness.  I could probably fine-tune
textures forever and still not get it exactly right.  The scarf and stick
textures were also a little complicated.

I also spent some time on the lighting set-up.  Basically there is an area light
representing the sun, a light underground and one off to the side to represent
light reflected off the ground and to help fill in shadows, and then a couple
lights just for the ground and background.  If you have questions about how I
did it, I'd be happy to give you details.

Unfortunatly, to get within the size limit I had to shrink the image down a bit
so you can't see as much detail as I would like.