EMAIL: defreese@alumni.princeton.edu NAME: David A. DeFreese TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Volcano.jpg RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio 5 TOOLS USED: 4Elements (Earth, Wind, Fire), CorelDraw 6 for jpg conversion and copyright info RENDER TIME: 35 minutes HARDWARE USED: 233MHz G3 PowerMac IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This was the better concept out of a few that I tried. Oddly enough, my wife and I have very different perceptions of what this image means. I first composed the image as what I could imagine Hell to look like complete with fire, brimstone, and hellfire. My wife, the optimist, thought it looked more like the birth and development of a planet. Different perspectives- Yin and Yang. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I originally wanted to just test some concepts with Rayflects 4Elements for Ray Dream Studio. Some of the effects worked out well (like the volcano, the lava, the geyser, etc.) according to what I thought I could do with my skill set. First, I created a simple landscape of a terrain (4Elements Earth) for the cooling lava flow and the atmosphere (4Elements Wind). The cooling lava sea uses the RDS cellular component for the color, transparency, bump, shininess, highlight and glow. Underneath the lava is a flat plane with a simple base color and matching glow. Also in the basic terrain is a low level terrain element (4E Earth), a distant mountain range (4E Earth) and a lumpy, wispy Fog element. The volcanic elements are 4E Earth again with craters carved into them. Inside the craters are glowing spheres (for the pooling lava), fire elements, and several fountain elements for the geysers. The main weakness for the fountain particle effect is that the particles are all triangles, so I had to make the particle size very small to minimize the result or very large to create an overlap of the particles. I used another Rayflect plug-in 'Aura' to give all of the glowing elements a 'real' glow. This highlighted the terrain beneath the lava sea, implying that there is a still molten sea beneath the cooling lava terrain. It also helped improve the volcanic geysers along with the lava colored lights embedded throughout the geysers.