TITLE: Augustine NAME: Aaron W. Silver COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: awsilver@sgstudios.com WEBPAGE: www.3d.sgstudios.tzo.com TOPIC: Garden COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: augbloom.jpg RENDERER USED: Ray Dream Studio 5.5 TOOLS USED: Rhino, Ray Dream Studio 5.5, Photoshop RENDER TIME: est 30min HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 500 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: St. Augustine grass is a really broad leaf grass that grows here in southeast Texas, and occationally it produces a bloom which is almost alien looking in nature. My wife, being Scottish, has always called the "yard" the "garden". This image just seems to help her argument. It was a nice exercise in "organic" modeling and perspective matching for me (I usually do industrial 3D stuff for an oil tool company -- flowers are an entirely new realm for me :). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Initially I took some pictures of the St. Augustine Bloom simply because you don't see them often and I wanted a little something different to model. The original pictures I then pulled to photoshop and pulled out the textures (or at least something to start with). I then gathered a few grass blades, and scanned them in for texture reference also. Using Rhino, I then tried to recreate the petals, and other elements of the flower itself. I then moved on to recreating the grass blades (these were interesting since they wrap around one another kinda strangly). All the model parts were then pushed out of rhino and textured, positioned and rendered in Ray Dream Studio 5.5. The background was taken at the last minute with a digital camera flung into my yard to help get a the perspective of blades of grass at grass level. I ended up blurring the reference image and using it as a backdrop to add depth to the scene, and see if RDS could achieve good results in perspective matching.