TITLE: The Aral Sea NAME: Chris COUNTRY: UK EMAIL: c.bunker@plymouth.ac.uk TOPIC: The Sea COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT JPGFILE: aral.jpg RENDERER USED: Lightwave 5.6 TOOLS USED: Photoshop (for bump maps, colour maps) RENDER TIME: 46 minutes 22 seconds HARDWARE USED: G3 300MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A picture of the sea without a drop of water as the Aral sea used to be a large inland sea in the former Soviet Union, because of the Soviet attempts to create a cotton growing industry upstream from it, and the massive amounts of water that this absorbed, a large percentage of the sea has now dried out leaving the former fishing communities that lived around it, and their boats high and dry . In this image I wanted to try and show the the fragility of the world and how in quite a short space of time we can create dramatic changes to our environment, changes that are not always for the best . I used the image of a fishing boat coming home with a full load and surrounded by a flock of seagulls, hoping to steal some of that load, as a good prosperous image of good fortune . Then I twisted it, changing the sea to land and the seagulls to vultures, the circling presence of whom is a used as a symbol of death in many a western . I hope this juxtaposition of the too different feelings will reinforce one another . DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: First I built the fishing boat as this was to be the forcus of the scene and would therefore control the feel of everything else around it . Next I produced a very simple ground plain to rest it of . At this point I set up how these major models where positioned and lit . In texturing them I did the ground first by trying to make it look like an OK seascape by giving it a multitude of bump maps, colour maps, and defuse maps . Then I changed the colours of the colour maps from blues to yellows, and got rid of all the specular . After this nowing the scale I was working to I built my vulture, this are of a very low detail, as I new that they would only just be seen and therefore a high detail would not be needed . This and several copies, where imported into my scene along with an equally low detail set of mountains for the backdrop . I added a light yellow fog to simulate a dusty enviroment and the natural fogging that always occours when looking accross a large distance . All that was then needed was to play with the rendering settings to to create the final image . h h F H Monaco g__ _ tk _ g__ u L O _ _ L O _ ____v _ _ R*ch _ H H ( 0____ > A, x _ h h _ _ d ' 0 ____ 6 E Monaco Helvetica Confidential _ _ _ _ H h h F g__ _ F MPSR BBST ___ ___ L g__