TITLE: Ahoy Ye Scurvy Scum, Me Thinks There's Treasure To Be Found; Arrrggghhhh NAME: Michael McGonigle COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: gonzzz@hotmail.com WEBPAGE: N/A TOPIC: Stills topic... LANDMARKS COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: ahoy.jpg RENDERER USED: 3D Studios Max R 2.5 TOOLS USED: Bryce 2.0, Poser 3.0, 4D Paint, 3D Studios Max R 2.5 PLUGINS USED: Digital forest beta, Scatter. RENDER TIME: 2 hours 26 mins HARDWARE USED: Pentium 100, 16 meg memory IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Jack and Jill like many other children are huge fans of Peter Pan... no, I correct myself, Jack and Jill unlike many children are huge fans of the meanest fictional character to sail the seven seas; Captain Hook !!!!! One afternoon after the two children did some finger painting ( mind you Jill, not being the best of artists got more paint one herself than on the paper ) were miserable after watching the Disney cartoon "Peter Pan" due to Captain Hook's humiliating defeat at the hands of that pesky little brat Peter. Being in a Captain Hookish sort of mood they decided to outside into their backyard and play pirates. "I want to be Captain Hook," exclaimed Jill, "You always get to go Captain Hook," complained Jack "I'm Captain Hook this time!" "OK fine then, I'll go Smee instead." "You can't be Smee," said Jack, "Fido's being Smee this time!" The two children bickered between themselves for some time, but their quarreling quickly ceased when Fido's barking towards a familiar "MARK ON THE LAND" brought them to notice the new mark on their lawn. "X marks the spot," exclaimed Hook (Jack) "Grab a shovel and get diggin' me hearties, there's buried treasure to be found ere', arrrrrggggghhhhh." =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Jack and Jill are looking for buried treasure in their backyard and as all good pirates know, treasure is where X marks the spot !!!!! Instead of interpreting the topic landmarks as a physical landmark like the Statue of Liberty, Pyrimids etc, I've interpreted it as a "MARK ON THE LAND" ( in this case the mark is the X ) PLEASE NOTE I am colour blind and I couldn't really see the red x in my image. So when i first created it, I made it black so I could see it and then I edited it from there. In the final render I just changed the colour from black to red. So now I cant make out the x in the image, but my friends and family seem to be able to see it fine and they sounded convincing enough to me so I left it red. So what I am really saying is I apologise to all those colour blind viewers that are like myself that cant take the pleasure in viewing the x, but I assure you ( like everyone else did ) that it is there !!!! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: - The tree on the side and the bushes in front of the fence were created with the digiforest plugin in 3dsmax v1.1 and I exported this into 3dsmax v2.5 - The boy, girl and dog were created in poser 3 and exported into 3dsmax v2.5 - The grass was created by first making 4 unique blades of grass, each with a slightly different shade of green. Then I used the built in plugin in 3dsmax v2.5 called scatter on each individual blade of grass. ( scatter creates a random array over a given surface in this case the ground allowing you to have each object perpendicular to the surface ) The random array I created consisted of about 15000 per blade so in the end when you put all the 4 different blades of grass together you would get 4 x 15000 = 60000 blades of grass. - The red cross and reeds on the back and side were made using the same technique as the grass except on a much smaller scale and with different coloured materials - The umbrella was created by lofting a rectangle around a wavy circular path, then tapering it at one side and then tapering it with symmetry ( in middle ) to get the narrow look in the middle - Everything else was created using geometry ( ie eyepatches, paper pirate hats, flag, bricks, fence table and chairs etc. ) - I used 4d paint to paint onto some of the clothing the kids are wearing. - The sky was created in bryce 2.0 as a image and the image was used as a background in the render.