TITLE: Little Tree NAME: Corbin S Phillips COUNTRY: United States EMAIL: corbin.phillips@home.com TOPIC: Spirit of Asia COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: littletr.jpg RENDERER USED: 3d Studio Max TOOLS USED: 3d Studio Max RENDER TIME: 1 hr 20 min HARDWARE USED: Pentium III 600mz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An old, but not ancient, bonsai tree is being tenderly cared for on a back porch in the Chinese highlands. The owner of the tree may be trying to overcome his disappointment at the death of his small growth of Chinese pines. (or mabey he is angry at the modeler who failed to come up with any good way to represent 75,000 pine needles). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: There were a couple of new things (at least for me) that I tried in this scene. First of all, I used no hand-drawn images in any of the materials. All the materials in the composition are procedural maps that I tweaked and combined to get the effect I was looking for. And except for a very few instances I am pleased with the results. Secondly, once I started putting the scene together, I realized quickly that working with so many faces (220,000 at one point) would make things very frustrating. What I came up with was using a layering method. I first created a scene with just the blue sky and the particle system clouds. I rendered that to a bitmap and used that graphic as the environment map for the mountain range. I again rendered the scene to a bitmap and used the new graphic as the environment map for the ground plane, forest and dead trees. After that I added the porch geometry, and after one last bitmap rendering, I put the detail of the tree, table and other objects on the environment map of all the rest. Sort of a layman's version of camera matching. As for the foreground objects, the bonsai trunk is a cylinder that I scaled and smoothed to the shape I wanted. The foliage groups are particle clouds with instanced geometry (they turned out better than I hoped). All the other objects are combinations of standard and extended objects manipulated by vertices. Once again, all the materials in the scene are procedural maps.