TITLE: There's Always A Bigger Fish
NAME: Peter Yu
COUNTRY: Earth
EMAIL: fgl1kpro@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: none
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: crsfish.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    LightWave 5.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop 4, Notepad

RENDER TIME: 
    8244 seconds (2 hours, 17 minutes, 24 seconds)

HARDWARE USED: 
    K6/233, 96MB, FireGL 1000 Pro, Scanner

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


In the deep blue sea, there are small fish and big fish. Big fish rule the
waves, and this image is loosely based upon that concept.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This whole image, more than anything else, was about learning new ways of doing
things. It was never designed to be a good rendering, rather, I used this
project as a way of trying to do the sea effect in the most efficient way
possible, with minimal modeling and set up. I know that the judges will give me
a hard time, because I managed to create a crap rendering with a high end
program, but that matters not! Winning, heh, prizes, heh, a Jedi craves not
these things! I'd still appreciate some comments, though.

I gave myself 2 hours to set up the scene from scratch. It took me 4 hours to
complete that (not including the scanning, because I don't have a scanner, had
to borrow one), due to some instability from using PointsClone+. Almost every
technique I used here was new to me, so it was quite educational.

All textures are LightWave procedurals, except for the fish. Again, this is
something new to me.

I scanned in some side views of fish. Using those images as a reference, I built
a simple fish model using Metanurbs then surfaced it using bump, specular and
diffuse maps based on the scans. The fish textures are actually very detailed,
but the lighting isn't right, so you can't see it. I made a quick shark model
using Metanurbs. I made the ground with a displacement map and surfaced it. 

I needed to populate the ground with corals so I built a sphere and tried to use
the PointClone+ plugin to duplicate it over each point in the ground plane. It
crashed every time I tried. I wrote my own (badly written) Lscript version of
the plugin and used that, luckily it worked. But I didn't realize that there
was already a ParticleClone Lscript that comes with Lightwave. I reinvented the
wheel for nothing. The spheres blanketed the ground, but it was too uniform.

Then I took a procedural clip map and cut up the spheres, applied Fractal Noise
to it, and that resulted in the stuff that you see on the ground.

The sea surface is a bump mapped plane with lots of specularity and a fractal
mapped sphere that it refracts. Steamer was used to get the volumetric
lighting, the streaks were made using a projection image (made from a LightWave
procedural) for the spotlight. There is some noise representing plankton et
cetera that was created with with 2 sets of particles. The spots were particles
with slight motion blur, the white noise (look closely) is particles with a
fractal displacement map and motion blur (the displacement map can be animated,
creating the blurred look).

The final scene and objects are too big for me to upload and my Lscript is
basically useless since LW has it's own version of it.