TITLE: A day at the beach ... NAME: Sammy Fischer COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: sammy@cube.net WEBPAGE: http://home.talkcity.com/GalleryDr/schnoet TOPIC: Landmark COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: sf_ldmk.jpg RENDERER USED: Maxon Cinema4D XL v5.29 TOOLS USED: Corel Photopaint, Organica, Hair Department Plugin RENDER TIME: 7'16'' HARDWARE USED: Dual P2-333, 384MB IMAGE DESCRIPTION: "The Beaches of Snaag are the place to be during the hollydays. Everybody who is anybody can be found swimming, sailing or just relaxing under the golden glow of the Holly Message, the mysterious object which fell from the sky 400 years ago and killed over 2000 people in the resulting flood." (Excerpt from "Snaag : The Mystic Island - A travelling Guide" by Sohlong N. Goodbi) This is a depiction of a landmark in at least 2 ways, the most obvious one being the fact that it's a tourist attraction for the (rather small and humanlike) aliens. Aside of that, the plaquette which went into space attached to Pioneer10 on March 2nd 1972 was, as far as I know, the first concious (even if futile) attempt to send a message to possible intelligent extraterrestrial life forms by mankind. It is futile in so far, as it will take Pioneer10 over 2 million years before it reaches another star system (the Taurus), and the chance for such a relatively small object of being found at all are microscopally small ... DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The Aliens are the standard aliens I'm using since the First Encounter round. They were created with Organica, and their different positions were created partly using bones in C4D and partly directly in Organica. The ground was created by using the magnet on a plane for the earth. I then copied it and moved the copy a few points higher. The copy received a half transparent texture to created the effect of gras. The Birds are a good example on things that shouldn't be done : I used a high Polygon count bird created a few month ago in Organica to get a general impression of what it would look like. Sadly, I was so please by the way the group of birds fit in the picture that I never came around to exchange the objects with their low Poly counterpart. (this explains the rather long rendering time) the Chain was done by first creating 2 links, making an awfull lots of copies (I don't remember exactly how many), and aligning them to a spline. The Plaque's engraving was done by editing a photo of the original plaque I found on the internet. (The same texture was used for the explanation plaque on the binocular ... something sadly not apparent in 800x600:( All the hairs were done using Hair Department, a PlugIn for Cinema4D. The plastic donut with duck head was created in Organica. The parasols got their tension using displacement mapping. They also include a spot lamp to create the lighter shades underneath them. Speaking of lights : I used a lensflares to create the reflection of the sun on the surface of the plaque. It's nearly invisible, but I think it adds to create the 'golden' look. I added my signature and increased the compression factor (very slightly : from 0 to 1, but it made the difference between >250k and <250 ;)) in Corel Photopaint. I hope you enjoy the picture and good luck to all contestants, Sammy