TITLE: Surfing the Slug
NAME: Sammy Fischer
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: sammy@cube.net
WEBPAGE: schnoete.home.ml.org
TOPIC: Water
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: surf.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Maxon Cinema 4D XL 5.25

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel Photopaint 8, Poser2, CineHaar Plugin

RENDER TIME: 
    8 Minutes 44 Seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    A brand new, self assembled Dual PII-333


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I always thought that living in a house on water would be great (If there
weren't any
moskitos), so the idea to build such a house came rapidly. After that it was
just an 
answering of questions. 'Who lives there?', 'what're they like?' and, most
importantly, 
'what are they doing if they don't even have electricity top power up some
computer game?'


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I first began by building a rough house and play around with the particle system
to do 
the fire place (which looks great when animated). I then added the rope and
other small 
details which actually aren't seen on this picture. The roof is done using the
same texture 
(irregular vertical lines) 4  times using different mapping  methods and while
genlocking 
part of the orginal picture). I had to put a black texture underneath or the
light of the
fireplace would have shown through the genlocked areas. 
The moss is just a rather ugly picture(different shades of green)  I painted, 
mapped 
as soft genlock on the original wood texture. 
C4D-XL in the 5.25 Version supports mip-mapping, and although the quality is
very good, I think 
it's not always the perfect method for bump map, as the wood looks slightly too
slick, although
I have a bump map with 100trength on it:\

I then did the water. It's just a ground object with the 2D-Water Shader on it
as bump map (Of course 
Transparency with refraction and reflections are enabled)

Next came the slug (a loft object, for which the splines were aligned  along a
near sinus), the 
copies of the house and the poser2 people. I know they are nude by the way,
thanx! ;) It was 
easier that way, and anyway ... it looked more 'natural'. I hope nobody will
feel all too shocked by 
these naked bodies.
Everybody, except the swimming girl has hairs done using the plugin CineHaar.

By then it looked all pretty nice, but not 'realistic' enough. So I began adding
the ripples and foam to 
the water (extra Additive Color, Bump and highlight Maps). The Water now have 3
different 
textures applied on it (all in all 30 texture maps!)

In the end I made a boat and used some drawn green lines applied on intesecting
planes as gras to 
fill some 'blank' areas. 

The rendering was done with Anti-Alias 3x3 on borders (german : Kante), soft
shadows, object motion blur 
(for the fireplace), refraction and reflections on.

Enjoy,
Sammy