TITLE: "Synthesis Number One"
NAME: Brian Prince
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: bprince@reno.quik.com
WEBPAGE: http://reno.quik.com/bprince
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bpsynth2.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Animation Master 7.1 beta 1

TOOLS USED: 
    RebumpX, Photopaint 7

RENDER TIME: 
    roughly 11 hours at 1200x800

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD-K6 running at 200MHz, 128 MB 7NS RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A quiet pond, rippled by a slight spring wind.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The first step in the production of this piece was to draw
a grayscale height map in Photopaint, to roughly define
the location of hills and gullies.  The map was then loaded
in RebumpX, and a 72x72 spline mesh was created and ported
into Animation:Master.

Focus then shifted towards creating the elevation-based
shaders and tweaking the terrain mesh to yield natural
shapes and textures.  The terrain shader is quite complex,
and utilizes dozens of nested turbulence, gradient, and
bump/dent attributes.  The only image map used is the bump
map on the water, all other textures are algorithmic.

After the land, sky, and lighting were roughed-in, plants
were modeled to add life to the scene.  The most distant
grass was created with help from A:M's fur shader.

After nearly a month of fine tuning and public critique,
its finally ready for the IRTC.

Please note that this image replaces bp_synth.jpg, an
earlier version of the scene.