TITLE: unicorn
NAME: Florian Wolper
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: flori76@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.florian-wolper.redirect4u.de
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: unicorn.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio

TOOLS USED: 
    Adobe Photoshop, Metacreations Poser and Bryce, ShadFur,
SimCloth (Freeware)

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hr 43 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 2-400, 384 MB Ram, about 400 MB virtual Memory

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

         The Unicorn-mistress. She lives in the Nimbrethil Forest, which is
located at the South of East-Beleriand.
         There are no Unicorns any more, but this one. And it truts the mistress
completely.
         


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

         I found a nice image painted by Tim Hildebrand. I used it as reference.

         The house and the tower are mainly primitives and some loft objects.
The timber bars have been created 
         seperately. This makes texturing much easier.
         the roof is a pyramide, on which a relax modifier as been applied to.
(By the way: the texture has been taken
         from a broom)
         Next was to create the stairs in front of the hous. The, conform to the
stairs, I created some planes and
         applied a noise modifier on the. Some tweaking to fit the stairs and
the walls.
         Then I created the planes used to show the tree textures. The backround
has been made with Bryce; but it did
         not fit the scene. So I had to cover the biggest part with trees. Also
I used some brushes to cover the
         mismatching trunks.
         Then I created a volumen light and placed in front of it a irregular
object (you cannot see it in the scene)
         to get different rays of light (the same as in the forest).
         Then I applied the ShagFur on the noisy planes to create the grass.
         The mistress was created in Poser, exported to a *.lwo file, and then
imported to 3d Studio. This way I do not
         loos the textures. The I replaced the bodyparts with some simple
primitives to make the cloth calculation 
         faster. When the cloth was readi, I deleted the invisible bodyparts to
save polygons.
         The same applies to the horse, except the deleting and cloth creation
part. I used 3 particle systems
         on the horse to create the sparkling effect. I used a material with
effect channel, to which I applied a glow
         effect in the video post rendering.
         Both characters were stored in seperated files. (Working in big scenes
slows all down).
         The foreground has been created in a seperated file too. I made a
rendering of the scene with the house and used
         it as backround for the creation of the foreground. This way I could
work on a low polygone scene again.
         The last step was to assemble all the seperated files and do the final
rendering.
         
         I am really sorry for not giving away the recource file, but it is
about 25 Megabytes large and does not include
         any textures...

         (Sorry for my poor English)