TITLE: Imagine NAME: Alan Wong COUNTRY: United States of America EMAIL: alan.2.wong@uconn.edu TOPIC: Insects and Spiders COPYRIGHT: I Submit To The Standard Raytracing Competition Copyright. JPGFILE: awxximag.jpg RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max R3.0 TOOLS USED: IrfanView32 2.80 RENDER TIME: 1 Hour 30 Minutes Scene Statistics: 218099 Vertices 430019 Faces 573 Objects HARDWARE USED: Athlon Thunderbird 800@920 384MB Physical RAM 542MB Virtual Memory Logitech MouseMan+ Wheel 3M Precise Mousing Surface ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image Idea: Similar to my last image (with the beer can and the ants), the idea for this image came spontaneously. Of course, it took some work to that point. At first, I wanted a realistic butterfly image, with a caterpillar, but as I worked on that, I got bored since my previous image for IRTC was also a realistic insect. So I got thinking, and tried to make a strange butterfly that was impossible in real life... the stainglass butterfly. And then I made a pipecleaner butterfly. After making the pipecleaner butterfly, I looked back at the stainglass butterfly, and it just was not getting anywhere good, so I ditched it and fixed up the pipecleaner butterfly, and figured I could make a whole scene with pipecleaners. That ultimately did not happen since I have a cardboard tube, construction paper, and lots of tape in the scene as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A kindergarten class had an assignment, to make some sort of display about some sort of insect. With a unanimous vote, the kids wanted to make a display with the butterfly as the insect. Using whatever materials they could in the classroom, the kids (and the teacher) built this display after several days of hardwork. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Just as a note, all textures in this scene are procedural materials that I have made in 3dsmax. No bitmaps were used. Also, all objects in the scene are made by me. No premade objects were used. And finally I did not use anyone elses work. Ok then... here we go: The smaller butterfly, flowers, sun, clouds, and outlines of the mountain are all pipecleaners. They were all made in a similar manner. Basically, I will take lots of splines and make structure of object, and then loft it with a circle. Then set a material to it, and bingo, a lot of wires. The final step was to put fur on it with Shag:Fur, a second bingo, I got a pipecleaner stucture. Set some color to the fur with a pastel colored material, and there we go... The background, the ground, and the grass were all made in a similar manner as well. I would take a rectangular spline, make it 8.5x11 and then modify it from there. Many were just whole sheets of paper, but those that are cut are not larger than the sheets of paper. The cuts, though, were simple to make. Just add more vertices to the spline, and move them around. The grass and mountains were done like this. Next, I made tape. I took a box, made it ?x.75x.001, where the ? is the length of the tape. Noise it to make the cuts at the ends and then it was done. Then I just spent lots of time overlapping the sheets of paper and then randomly putting tape at the overlaps. The material for this was much more difficult. Basically, its a composite material (love these... if you use max, use this often), with 4 layers. The main layer is just a simple noise to not let the paper take a solid tone. The next layer is a lot of nested fractal noises, simulating strands in the construction paper. It was colored the color of the paper. The next layer is a similar thing, with nested fractal noises, except it was white, to simulate the white strands. And the final layer is again, nested fractal noises, but black to simulate black strands. The white and black were made less opaque since they do not occur as much. The final product looked very convincing. The tape was much easier. It was just a material with an opacity map that was a noised gradient ramp, more opaque on the sides, less opaque in the middle. Next is the big butterfly in the middle. The construction paper wings were done like the rest of the construction paper in the picture, but with glitter added. I just made some flat squares and did a scatter on an extruded spline. The texture is a simple material with self illumination and a high shininess. The body was made with a cardboard tube, styrofoam, and more pipecleaners. The cardboard tube is just a tube, but with a brown version of the construction paper material, with something added. I put in the bump a gradient ramp, but made it very thing, so that i could get a line. I then tilted it a bit and got the spiral on the tube. The styrofoam is just a sphere or half sphere with a material. The material was white or black, with a heavy bump made with a cellular map. The pipecleaners were described before. And finally, I used my HUD again. I took a camera, 35mm, and bound the title and my logo to it so that they moved with the cam, then I just pointed the cam in the direction I wanted. The lighting was probably the second most difficult part of the scene, with the most difficult being the textures. In order to get the right lighting, I needed seven lights. This is due mostly to max's horrible renderer. Two of the lights were direct lights, put behind the background and under the ground to simulate the radiocity from those. The rest of the five lights were omnis, placed everywhere to light the scene up realistically. And that is the story of this little picture. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Past Entries: 2001 January-February (Worship) AWxxWtC.jpg AWxxWtC.txt "Worship the Can" May-June (Insects and Spiders) AWxxImag.jpg AWxxImag.txt "Imagine" ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits: Alan Wong -------------------------------------------------------------------------