TITLE: Robot Totem
NAME: Alain Bertrand
COUNTRY: Switzerland
EMAIL: hazard3d@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/hazard3d
TOPIC: WORSHIP
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ab_robot.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave 6.5

TOOLS USED: 
    DarkTree for procedural texture and a bit of Photoshop for some
textures

RENDER TIME: 
    15 hours (rendered at 1280 x 960 originaly and then rescaled to 800
x 600)

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 600 Mhz with 256 Mb of ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

What religion in a not too far future could be. A bolt and a screw found on a
cliff of trash
may be interpreted by a people as sign left by a god. Is actual religion very
far from this
idea ? Well, it's not my intention to judge ;-)

The goal of this image was to achieve a look similar to a Christian painting of
a religious scene,
with a futuristic content.

Taken from the robot religion booklet:
After the destruction of humanity (or maybe a human is still alive, but nobody
knows where),
we (the robots) found a holy totem, wich you may see in this picture taken by a
friend of mine
(R3455Z6) 1 year ago. This is an emerging religion and the head priest says the
totem
is the incarnation of god (the first robot created (R1)).


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All objects and textures was created by myself for this contest. Some use
subdivision
technology to achieve "organic" shapes. However, most are standard extruded,
booleaned
shapes. I used motion blur (within lighwave) to achieve the rotor effect of the
robot at top left.
Volumetric light produced the "light ray" of the totem. An area light was used
for the main
lightning (got some nice soft shadows with it I think). 2 other infinite lights
were used for
fill lightning. I had  2 main problems with this image: the trash and the
distance effect.
I started with the idea of creating a ton of objects to achieve the trash
effect...
but I didn't have the time to create as many objects as I wanted to, so I added
an big object
to obtain the cliff effect. The distance effect on my first render had a badly
flat
effect, and it was difficult to imagine how far away the background was,
therefore the image
appeared fake. So I decided to add some "ground fog" effect with the help of
hypervoxels
(which was time consuming), and achieved what I think is a good compromise.