TITLE: Lunar Ruins NAME: J. D. Craig COUNTRY: USA EMAIL: AzChip@aol.com WEBPAGE: none TOPIC: Stills, Ruins COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: lunar.jpg ZIPFILE: lunar.zip RENDERER USED: Ray Dream 3D (Yes, the 99 dollar program by MetaCreations) TOOLS USED: Photoshop 5.0 for textures, Ray Dream 3D for all modeling, Photoshop LE for color correction RENDER TIME: About five minutes HARDWARE USED: Compaq Armada 1750 P2 for modelling and rendering, HP Vectra for color correction IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Two astronauts come upon a surprising discovery after humanity returns to the moon. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I've only recently bought RayDream 3D, just to try my hand at 3D, so everything was done in this program. I used the free-form modeler to create the lunar landscape. It was a shape extruded out and modified by manipulating the extrusion envelope and sweep path. I created individual cross sections throughout the sweep path and altered them, too. It took about twenty minutes to get the basic shape of the moonscape. Once the shape was done, I moved a camera all over the moonscape to find a nice view point (kind of like walking around a real landscape with a camera in hand -- it was fun) and spent more time doing this than modeling the moonscape. The moonscape textures were created in Photoshop 5.0. Initially I used a cloud render to create the basic colors and then added some noise. I blurred the whole thing and broke the file up into quarters to build a seamless texture. The bump map is taken from a NASA photo of an asteroid. I used a small portion of a cratered field and made it seamless. This photo was only imported into the Bump channel and resulted in a very nice little crater texture. I used the box/face mapping mode for the moonscape object instead of the parametric mode because it seems to work better that way. The columns are just extruded shapes with scallops along the edges and a bevel on the top and bottom. The base is lathed in the free-form modeler, too. The astronauts were a little more complex to build, but all the components were done in the free-form modeller and hooked together in such a way as to make posing possible. RayDream 3D doesn't have any Inverse Kinematics (RayDream Studio 5.5 does, and I'll be upgrading when I can), so it was a little wonky getting the guys to stand and walk right. The Earth is just a sphere primitive with an image of earth I painted in Photoshop parametrically mapped onto it. The starfield is just a Photoshop document, black background, airbrush tool set to dissolve with a pressure of 1 and spattered across the black. It's set as the scene's background (which is mapped into a sphere around the scene in RayDream 3D).