TITLE: The Return of Quetzalcoatl NAME: Ashton Mason COUNTRY: South Africa EMAIL: amason@cs.uct.ac.za WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.uct.ac.za/~amason/silicon.trip/Quetzalcoatl/ TOPIC: History COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: quetzal.jpg RENDERER USED: 3D Studio MAX TOOLS USED: Photoshop, Unwrap modifier for MAX RENDER TIME: 45 minutes HARDWARE USED: Pentium 2, FIRE GL 1000 Pro OpenGL card IMAGE DESCRIPTION: My image depicts the return of the god Quetzalcoatl to the ancient city of Teotihuacan. Situated in modern day Mexico and believed to have been built in around 100AD, the city was already ancient and deserted in the time of the Aztecs. The name Teotihuacan is an Aztec word meaning something like "the city where the gods were made". Quetzalcoatl ("feathered snake") was worshipped by nearly all the pre-columbian South and Central American cultures, and predates even Teotihuacan. He symbolises variously the wind, the sun, a bringer of civilization, and the spiritual (bird) and earthly (snake) nature of man. The Quetzalcoatl depicted here is my interpretation of the feathered snake god worshipped at Teotihuacan, and the statue of Quetzalcoatl in the foreground is modelled on the carved heads that adorn the Temple of Quetzalcoatl there (see the web page for pictures). These carved heads also seem to resemble pumas. In my depiction of the god himself I tried to portray Quetzalcoatl descending from the sky as the people of Teotihuacan might have imagined him. The imagery is intended to be strongly psychedelic, reflecting the influence of the use of peyote cactii and psilocybin mushrooms at Teotihuacan on its culture, religion and art. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: All objects were created with mesh modeling (that is, by creating a simple initial mesh primitive and then refining it into the correct shape by means of successive operations on vertices, faces, and edges). In the case of all objects except the pyramids a control mesh was used to simplify the modeling process. The final mesh is then a referenced copy of the control mesh with a MeshSmooth modifier applied to it. The statue and pyramids were closely modelled on the originals, from pictures of Teotihuacan found in books and on the web. The temples at the tops of the pyramids no longer exist, so some artist's licence was required there :) Bumps maps were used extensively to create the impression of detail. In the case of the statue, all the surface details such as the spiral ear design, nostrils and patterning around the eyes were created with bump maps, hand- drawn in Photoshop to resemble those on the original statues. I used the freeware Unwrap modifier by Peter Watje to align the textures with the geometry. To make the ground and pyramids more realistic "muck maps" were used to simulate surface dirt. Basically, hand-drawn greyscale textures were used to selectively replace the actual surface texture with black dirt (along the edges of the stairs, for example). Muck maps help to create realism by simulating the accumulation of dirt in places where it would likely occur. For the texture on the pyramid walls and the cracked earth in the near foreground I used a texture by Nik Palmer that I found at 3DCafe. All the other textures were created in MAX using procedural maps or hand-drawn in Photoshop. Many of them combine several levels of Noise maps in order to create more complex and believable results. Volume lights were used to create the light rays and green haze. The light rays themselves were created by surrounding the light with a shade made by deleting some faces from a geodesic dome, and were coloured by making the light a projector light with a gel image created in Photoshop. The sky is a background texture created in Photoshop.