TITLE: City of sea pixies
NAME: Markus Borbely
COUNTRY: Sweden
EMAIL: markus@netch.se
WEBPAGE: http://www.efd.lth.se/~d95mbo/
TOPIC: Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: underwat.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3DS Max 3.0

TOOLS USED: 
    3DS Max, Photoshop, terragen

RENDER TIME: 
    6 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Celeron 400, 256 Mb RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

This is the Sea pixies city hidden inside a giant klam. When the larger
creatures of the ocean hunt outside the klam they close it and feel warm and
secure inside.
I got the Idea from M_rta Wallin. Great thanx to her for the idea of a city in a
klam.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

In order of creation:

Klam
A big job with first basic polygon shapes and then some meshsmooth. Lot's of
polygons. The inside is chrome. The outside diffuse color is a 2D map made in
photoshop (as is the bumpmap).
The Klam is covered in seaweed thoose were placed using scatter (we will see
more of scatter further down, read on).

Sand
A heigtfield from terragen and a spacewarp. Basic sand texture from 3DSmax.

Stone
The stone is a simple sphere I think. The grass on top of it is made by a simple
opacitymap (made in photoshop).

Coral
Made with meshsmooth. Procedural maps for the holes.

Vegetables
Three different objects. Each of them one scatter. The large ones is first
lofted and then scattered. Each instance consists of many many polygons. It had
to look smooth.
The one barely visible in the background is also scatter of basic cylinders I
think.
The one that covers the entire bottom in the foreground is spred using scatter
(again) and a distribution object with holes cut for the klam, the stone and
the coral.

City
Basic objects and CSG. The frames are lofts. The light is a videopost effect,
glow.

Fishes
The fishes are really last minute objects. Very simple shapes. I started on them
10:00 pm 31/8. Not very much time left. The fishschool is made with...
scatter!

Fog
is really plain old fog.

Caustic
The caustic light is a projector spotlight(!). The caustic map is from somewhere
on the net.