TITLE: Honey Bees
NAME: Michael B. Gleason
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: mgleason@mac.com
TOPIC: Insects and Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: honeybe1.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

    Strata


TOOLS USED: 

    Strata Studio Pro; Photoshop (for textures, export to jpeg)


RENDER TIME: 

    about 1hr 20min


HARDWARE USED: 

    Powermac G3 - 350 mhz - 256 megs of RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


"Honey Bees" - These assignments are really fun. The image is pretty straight
forward. Two honey bees are searching for nectar and pollen.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The bees are made up of both spheres and lathed shapes that were converted to
bezier surfaces. These surfaces were then pushed and pulled on to get the shape
I wanted. Then original textures were applied. The final touch is custom hair
shaders available in Strata (I never knew how furry these critters were til I
researched them). The wings are just a texture mapped to flat planes.
The purple-blue flower is a bezier surface (each petal) with an original texture
applied to the petals - not a photo texture. I added another texture across the
flower that is transparent except for the yellow debris - which is supposed to
be scattered pollen. The flower is fictional, although I_ve seen something like
it somewhere. The yellow flower is a cone shape with the petals being a texture
wrapped around it (the texture includes the transparency between the petals).
Lastly, the green spear-like foliage is an extruded shape, again converted to
bezier, and modified - texture applied.
I think the hair shaders add a lot of realism to the bees, but it obscures a lot
of effort I put into sculpting the head, thorax and abdomen - oh well.