TITLE: Patio NAME: Michael Scholz COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de TOPIC: Gardens COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: patio.jpg ZIPFILE: patio.zip RENDERER USED: 3DStudioMax2.5 TOOLS USED: Photoshop5.5 for copyright text and jpg-file RENDER TIME: 46 minutes HARDWARE USED: Dual PII400, 256MB Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This is a welcoming and peaceful garden, where I would like to be. A video clip by the german techno-trance band Schiller inspired me to parts of this image: it showed a minimalistic garden surrounded by structural glazing. There was water crossing through, and there were one or two bonsai-like trees. I started with this in the back of my head. More ideas came during the project and brought several changes: sand, rocks, more plants and stones, chairs and umbrella. The zip-file contains a series of pics which show the "making-of". DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Texturing The out-of-focus plants along the image borders are simple texture mapped planes, which have blurred opacity maps to get this effect. Treeleaves are also textured planes. The water mirrors more in the distance because of a gradient masking the reflection in the near. Lighting A direct light (sun) from above and several attenuated omnis with- in the scene to simulate radiosity: two light yellow ones for sand radiosity, two light green ones behind the glazing plus one orange omni where the umbrella is. And some more for lighting up shadows. To light up shadows I use "devided" lights: take the shadowcasting lightsource (A) and clone it (B). Turn clone (B) shadowcasting off and reduce its intensity to 30%, reduce the shadowcaster light (A) to 70% intensity = overall lighting is 100% but shadow is lighter.