TITLE: Leaving the Nest NAME: Donald V.S. Duncan COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: duncan@mortimer.com WEBPAGE: no yet available TOPIC: Flight COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: duncan.jpg RENDERER USED: Rhino 3D Win16 Beta (for rendering) TOOLS USED: Rhino 3D Win16 Beta (for modelling) RENDER TIME: 2 hrs 20 min HARDWARE USED: portions modelled on 486DX-66 / assembled and rendered on Pentium100 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The mention of flying plants in the Contest Topic caught my attention. Well it is true that various seeds fly, they are at the mercy of the wind. What might a self-propelled plant look like? Perhaps this image is one possible answer. With leaves instead of feathers and a bulb for a head, these young Venusian lilies are souring off in search of open ground and a new life. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The whole project started with the leaves. A grid of lines are various elevations was created to provide controlled 3D snap points. Arcs were drawn on this framework and the grid was removed. The arcs were then used to create a 3D mesh surface. These leaves were then copied using a polar array. Some of these were further copied to make the tail. Various rotations of the leaves were necessary to get the right effect. The body stalk was created by extruding a "four-leaf clover" shape along a path. A sphere was added as a terminal knob at the tail end. The bulb was a simple ellipsoid with another sphere added at the front end. The roots projecting from the tip of the plant are scaled down and rotated versions of the tail stalk. The entire flying plant was then copied in a polar array (with the centre point off one wing tip). Again, various rotations were made. At this point I was viewing the image through a camera and composing from a shot from a specific angle. The "mother" plants were created using the same leaves created at the beginning. They were scaled up and copied using a polar array. The centre points were filled with a spheres and decorated with larger versions of the tail stalk, also copied using a polar array. The finished plant was then copied three times. A plain was then added under the whole construction. A variety of colours, texture and bump maps were applied as I went. These provide the veining on the leaves, the roughness of the flower centres, and the grain in the ground. The final product uses three spot lights at various distances all oriented down along the y-axis centred one above each bloom, but a wide variety of lighting schemes were tried. Getting the right lighting was the hardest part of this scene.