EMAIL: zekaric@yahoo.ca NAME: Robbert de Groot TOPIC: Fire and Ice COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Playing With Fire With a Little Bit Of Ice COUNTRY: Canada WEBPAGE: http://members.shaw.ca/zekaric RENDERER USED: Carrara 4 Pro TOOLS USED: Carrara 4 Pro, Paint Shop Pro 5 RENDER TIME: About half and hour HARDWARE USED: Intel Celeron 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Who says there can't be some practical joking in Hell... Think of the retribution! DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I initially had a different idea of what image would be and my initial thought was that since the characters, yeah plural, were more cartooney that they would be a heck of a lot easier to make than something that was more realistic... Well it probably is easier but it still took me quite a bit of time to do the one character and thinking about finishing the others in the time frame probably wasn't in the cards. I still like look of the devil but I know there are areas that I would like it to be better. It's close to what I was thinking but not totally exact. But anyway, it's all a learning process. Everthing in the scene except for the snowball, yes that's suppose to be a snowball, and the crown is done in the vertex modeller in Carrara. The floor, the column base and the back wall are displacement mapped using Digital Carvers Guild plugin for Carrara, so the actual geometry is fairly simple in comparison to what you are actually seeing. The snake like part of the column was also fairly simple to create, lofting a circle up a spiral and then selecting all the faces and extruding them. Keen eyes, or maybe not so keen, will notice that they are actually just flat faces but the shading or normals makes them appear a bit like they are rounded. The displacement mapping works most of the time but you can see some errors. I've tried to get rid of them, there were more, by reducing the amount of displacement but as you can see the floor still sufferes from some spots on the edges of the stones. This seems like a bug of sorts with the plugin. Pity, it did most everything else ok. I'll also point out another bug that you might not see as one is that slab between the brick of the column base and the snake pillar. The black edge on the top of that slab was unintentional and basically the same displacement map bug. At some point you just have to stop battling with the program and move on. The crown is bunch of 'fire' primitives that Carrara has internally. I was going for Hellboy's like idea with that. The snowball is a metaball object in Carrara. I thought about adding motion blur to it but seeing the rest of the image isn't perfect and I was somewhat losing the battle with Carrara in what I wanted to get I left it as is. About 9 lights mainly and not a whole lot to say about that. I think you can figure out what colour they are. The textures are all procedural and one or two parts coming from one or two other Digital Carvers Guild's plugins. Paint Shop Pro to convert to jpg only. My own nitpicks. A little darker than it should probably be. The black spots that I've mentioned above. Possibly more exaggeration on the pose of the little guy would be better. A bit monochomatic. The floor could use some work. Floor with the base of the wall and pillars could use some work as it looks cheaply done. Anyhoo, I hope you like it and got the impression that I was hoping to convey and that was that the devil getting smacked with a snowball.