TITLE: Scorpio
NAME: Paul Potiki
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: guanolad@hotkey.net.au
TOPIC: Wilderness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: scorpio.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave 5.5

TOOLS USED: 


RENDER TIME: 


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III, 550 mhz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I'm just a beginner at 3D, having only been at it for a few months. I managed to
get pretty good at doing geometric objects, and making them look fairly
realistic, and so when a friend discovered the IRTC site and showed me some of
the examples, I thought I'd fit in pretty well.

And so, typically, the first competition I can enter is an organic-based
subject! *sigh* Well, it's a good challenge, and worth a try.

I considered all the wild remote locations I could've used fto fulfil the
topic's requirements, and decided anything with plants in the shot was out of
the question. That left rocks, desert, ice, or water. Each have their own
difficulties, so I picked the easiest. Desert!

Deserts are typically barren, simple, dry, all things relatively straightforward
to put together - but it needed more than a bare sandy plain - so I stuck a
scorpion in the shot. (I was going to have him fighting a tarantula, but I
thought that was a bit ambitious at this stage - maybe another time)



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


First I created a ground object. I knew already that it didn't need to stretch
to a horizon, because the fog was going to hide the horizon-line. I generated a
few random bumps to make it a bit uneven, and smoothed them out. The sand
texture is just random noise generated in Photoshop, and the accompanying
bump-map is similar. Much later I added the hand-drawn crack bump-map, and then
the rippled sand bumpmap, which generated using Photoshop filters on some
vertical bands.

The tree is a little square and boxy. It was only intended as a background
object, and I couldn't seem to quite get it in such a location so as to look
large and to scale, while not dominating or casting awkward shadows. So it
stayed in the background in its simplest incarnation. The textures I found on
http://www.totallyseamless.com/

The little rocks are just distorted spheres, with some handmade bump-maps and
textures. It's one rock object cloned a few times, resized, and rotated.

The scorpion was the hardest, it is a squashed, stretched, and distorted sphere,
and the legs and claws, and tail too, are clones of the body with further
distortions, one for each separate segmentation. The textures and bumpmaps are
hand-drawn things that don't especially look realistic, but I hoped the
rendering would help. Which it did, though not as much as I would've liked.

I still have much to learn.

The sky is just a plain light blue background. The sun is a non-shadow-casting
light. The actual shadow-casting-light is offscreen stage right.