TITLE: First Contact NAME: Marlo Steed COUNTRY: Canada EMAIL: marlo.steed@uleth.ca WEBPAGE: http://www.edu.uleth.ca/faculty/members/steed/MarloSteed.html TOPIC: Ruins COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: contact.jpg RENDERER USED: StudioPro 2.5.3 TOOLS USED: StudioPro, Painter RENDER TIME: 12 hours HARDWARE USED: Mac G3 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: It took me a while to come up with an idea but I wanted to communicate the idea that ruins can be a future event. Interwoven is the concept that some things don't change. Our world history is fraught with examples of individuals and groups of people doing inhumane acts in the name of distrust and fear. Today in many parts of the world we see this problem reenacting itself over and over again (Rwanda, Bosnia, etc.). We are slow learners. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The modeling for this project was done entirely in Strata Studio Pro. The texures were created entirely from scratch in Painter with the exception of the moons' textures. The star field was created using a special affects module called Pixie Dust. I created three different pixie dust textures and then applied them to a construction object and sprayed them in 360 degress with random size. The planets were created using two different aura affects to simulate an atomosphere. The nebula was created using the cloud module and modifying the hue and density controls. The moons used textures that were downloaded of NASA's site. I wanted them to look realistic so why not go to the source. The sun was created using a combination of two Hot Spot modules. One with rays the other without. These were applied to sphere that had a fire texture. The result is the affect of the sun rays eminating from a glowing sphere. The ship was the most involved part of this project. The model was done with metaballs. I created an engine shape and then replicated it around the ship. The textures were the tricky part. I created the hull texture (color map, bump map, added a purple specular color) in Painter. I then also created a semi transparent dirt texture to give the ship a slightly aged look (not quite off the assembly line but not over aged in the stillness of space). The logo and symbols were stencil maps created in Painter and applied to the model. The blast affects were done in two ways. I created a model of some interior structure; walls that had been cut out with a stencil map, melted with a bump, and then singed with another stencil map. I then rendered that image and added that to a color map as part of a stencil texture. That is how the back blasts were created. The blast on the front part of the hull I did differently because I wanted a better sense of the hull being ripped open. In this instance, I used a combination of a stencil map to create the burn marks and transparency map to cut a hole in the hull. I then imported my internal structure model just beneach the hole in the hull. Unfortunately the internal structure was too small to see the detail that went into it. The Observation deck was created using boolean substraction to cut out the portal, and extrude to path to create the trim. The text was created in Painter and imported in as a texture. The Xradian ship views were different perspective renderings of the orgininal ship before being blasted. These were composited in Painter and imported as texture. I spent a lot of time experimenting with the spotlights. I tryed making them volumeteric by adding a mist but it spilled over in the alpha channel so I had to give up on that idea. The models were rendered out in 4 passes with alpha channels using Radiosity and Raytracing then composited, I don't have enough memory to do all this in one model.