TITLE: Spiderdawn NAME: Michael Scholz COUNTRY: Germany EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de TOPIC: Insects and Spiders COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: spdrdawn.jpg ZIPFILE: spdrdawn.zip RENDERER USED: 3DStudioMax TOOLS USED: Photoshop for texture preparation, copyright text and jpg-file RENDER TIME: 7 minute 20 seconds HARDWARE USED: Dual PII400, 256MB Ram IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I started out with an idea about colors, mood and camera- angle with a spider to be shown quite huge from below and with a red dawn sky. My local library had fine books with pictures of spiders - they were great modeling reference. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: Modeling All parts of the spider started out as spheres which were squeezed, stretched, bent and tweaked into shape. My gras is made out of opacity mapped planes. Another plane makes the ground, with a noise modifier added for some denting. Texturing The spider's textures are procedural noise maps. They are mixed together and used as bumpmap, too. To make the maps for the gras I scanned real gras and edited the images in Photoshop. There's a gras-texture in my zip-file. The sky is a blured foto mixed with a gradient. I blured a few of the gras-textures, too, to get a bit depth of field look. The ground-texture is a mix of two dirt fotos. A gradient opacity map fades out to blur the ground in the distance. Lighting Each part of the scene has its individual lighting. There are two lights for the spider (one strong spot light from above and a subtle omni below), and about three spots for the grasblades and ground. The spot for the spider, which make the bright specular on its body, would have been too much for the gras, therefore I choose to split the light.