TITLE: My Paragon of nature
NAME: Bryan Bailliache
COUNTRY: CANADA
EMAIL: bryanb@yesic.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.poboxes.com/bryanb
TOPIC: Nature
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bbnature.jpg
ZIPFILE: bbnature.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    LightWave 5.0

TOOLS USED: 
    none

RENDER TIME: 
    31 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-133 non-mmx 48megs mem Win95b


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


If there was a "first tree" on earth, what would it look like?

A tree on a pedestal of life, the earth, nature at it's best with
the gods admiring from above giving mother nature a thumbs up.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Basicaly my first "real" rendition.  I've always fooled/messed around
with 3d programs but this is my first real project.  

I was reading a tutorial on how to build trees under Lightwave one
rainy day and thought what a great idea for the nature contest.
Dave Jerrard's tutorial from NewTekniques April/May 1998 was my base
idea of how to grab copy rotate, repeat 20 times to come up with a tree.
I even got stuck and Dave was supper at giving me all the info i needed
via email.

But i didn't like how stick looking my tree was so i used metaballs to
create two roots protruding up from the ground.  I thought the roots
were good and very orgainc looking unlike my trunk so i just threw some
metaballs up the base and continued up the first few branches giving the
tree an organic bumpy look.  I also used his colours from the article for
the tree which has a few bump/fractal maps applied to it.  For the leaves
I also used his surfaces from the article (colour maps/bump maps) but to
make the tree look good i had to up the poly size of the leaves to 200%
which worked great.

For the ground i used an idea that Dan Ablan of "LightWave Power Guide"
fame's article from 3D Design's January 1998 on creating a terrain.
I used his magnet tip on a flat box to create a smooth landscape which
I surfaced with the leaves texture but at a much smaller/bumpier level.

The sky's just a dome with a fractal transparency texture fading into the
blue graident backdrop.

For the cool early morning, dark ages look, i used a black fog with a lens
flare above and used a 1 meg shadow map with 10fuzzzy edge.

Only took 31 minutes to render using field rending on and AAenhancedhigh
with adaptive sampling set to 1.