TITLE: Icon NAME: Paul Potiki COUNTRY: Australia EMAIL: guanolad@hotkey.net.au WEBPAGE: www.guanolad.com TOPIC: Worship COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: icon.jpg RENDERER USED: Lightwave 5.5 TOOLS USED: Photoshop for textures RENDER TIME: HARDWARE USED: Pentium III, 550 mhz, 32Mb Matrox G400 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Many's the time I've looked at the architecture of a church or chapel or similar and thought - that'd be great to model. All the frilly bits, all the towers, and then setting it in a little fenced off glade with a path to the doors and have fun with lights inside when seting it at night... But I decided that I didn't want to do that, as a good composition was a bit hard for me to picture. Instead I had this idea of looking down at the ground from a statue's point of view. And so here it is. It has a sense of peace to it, which fits the theme well, and also is from an angle that in real life nobody really gets to see. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: At first I wanted to have the statue be of a more kingly, or perhaps christ-like, person. Long hair, a beard, hands outstretched in a gesture of supplication. But bugger me if I couldn't find anything like that. I tried using Poser 3, but that was a real failure (if there's ever a program that could do with a GUI redesign, it's that 'Poser' pretentious nonsense. It sure lives up to its name). The hardest part was having to have him draped in a robe. So I looked around and eventually tracked down a figure called 'Mourner' from somebody's website: http://www.baument.com that seemed to suit what I was trying to achieve. It was a 3DStudio figure, but it translated into Lightwave reasonably well, and after some tweaking served my purposes. It's a bit too geometric, and I'm not talented enough (nor have the time) to make it more realistic - but it was the composition and overall atmosphere I was going for, not accuracy. The church wall is just a block with a brick texture - I would've liked to have had a rough edge to the line of the wall, but I couldn't seem to make it do anything when trying via a displacement map, so I left it as is. The fence is just a fence. Nothing special there. I made a few rods with little arrowhead thingies on them. The ground wasn't entirely a successful result, but it's not bad. I layered a grass texture, and brightened it a bit to make it look okay. The dirt was added via a texture that was distorted a little, then layered via a randomised clipmap I scribbled together. I like it. It's not amazing, but it comes across well, I think.