TITLE: Mirror Mountains
NAME: Marco Cavet
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: marco@cavet.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.cavet.de/
TOPIC: Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mirror_m.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    MAX 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for adding text

RENDER TIME: 
    19 hours 29 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium-200 MMX 64MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Imagine, it is springtime. You are on vacation somwhere in the mountains.
It's about 7 o'clock in the morning the air is fresh and clean.
And the low noise from the woods only emphasizes the silence.
I wanted to catch one of  these precious moments.
It would be nice if you could tell me if I failed or succeded. 



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


At first I've created the sky-background. 
It is an combination of an procedural map and an image map. 
I used it to get a balance between maximum scalability and maximum quality.
The second thing was the landscape itself. 
It's an simple grid with an special displacement texture on it. 
The real trick is in the displacement map which is an combination of an gradient
ramp 
and an fractal noise texture.
I used an top-down texture with transitions for the diffuse texture map. 
This way the horizontal parts are green and the vertical are grey.
Now I've added an simple plane with an water texture on it to simulate the
mountain lake.
I used some atmosphere gizmos so simulate fog and clouds.
Now I've got a pretty nice pic, but there were still the tricky part.
How to get enough trees for the woods in this pic without crashing 
my poor little computer.
I've rendered one tree on a white background.
This picture I used as map for an rectangle and I used the alpha channel of the
tree 
pic as opacity/transparency map.
Now I took the landscape and cloned it as editable mesh. I've cut all parts
away
where I didn't want trees placed (mountains, lake).
At last I used the resulting mesh as distribution object for my 
tree-rectangles and set the tree count to 30,000.
Now I only had to wait till my computer finished rendering. b--)