TITLE: The Day We Made Contact
NAME: Reko 'ReXX' Nokkanen
COUNTRY: FINLAND
EMAIL: rexx@sci.fi
WEBPAGE: http://www.sci.fi/~rexx
TOPIC: Unbelievable
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rexthing.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave 5.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop

RENDER TIME: 
    34 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 300A @ 374MHz / 128 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


The long years and money SETI spent for searching the extraterrestial
intelligence were not wasted.
On 2.5.1999 they came. On the shores of Stockholm, first contact was made. Our
quest to find advanced civilizations and
their infinite amount of wisdom is at last at end.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I spent days to decide if I'd participate and finally I had to as the idea in my
mind
has always been this sort of _really_ weird alien which has an aquarium in place
of his brains.
So I started tweaking the alien which is a pretty simple spline cage which was
then mirrored to provide the other half. Template
of the side of his 'body' was taken and all the necessary maps painted on that.
I tweaked with the maps for a looong time as I wasn't
quite sure what kind of skin I'd like it to have. So basically what you see now
is a hybrid of four different skins along with diffuse,
bump, specular and reflective maps added. The tentacles are boned and then
tweaked around, flag has a ripple displacement.
I'd think I spent around 15 tweaking the body, doing and scrapping different
aspects, doing the maps, rendering, rendering, rendering and rendering.
The drool is a metaball object and if I'll get back to this some day, I'll
probably tweak the eyes more.