TITLE: Little Tree
NAME: Corbin S Phillips
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: corbin.phillips@home.com
TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: littletr.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3d Studio Max

TOOLS USED: 
    3d Studio Max

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hr 20 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III 600mz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

An old, but not ancient, bonsai tree is being tenderly cared for on a back porch
in the Chinese highlands.  The owner of the tree may be trying to overcome his
disappointment at the death of his small growth of Chinese pines.  (or mabey he
is angry at the modeler who failed to come up with any good way to represent
75,000 pine needles).

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

There were a couple of new things (at least for me) that I tried in this scene. 
First of all, I used no hand-drawn images in any of the materials.  All the
materials in the composition are procedural maps that I tweaked and combined to
get the effect I was looking for.  And except for a very few instances I am
pleased with the results.
Secondly, once I started putting the scene together, I realized quickly that
working with so many faces (220,000 at one point) would make things very
frustrating.  What I came up with was using a layering method.  I first created
a scene with just the blue sky and the particle system clouds.  I rendered that
to a bitmap and used that graphic as the environment map for the mountain
range.  I again rendered the scene to a bitmap and used the new graphic as the
environment map for the ground plane, forest and dead trees.  After that I
added the porch geometry, and after one last bitmap rendering, I put the detail
of the tree, table and other objects on the environment map of all the rest. 
Sort of a layman's version of camera matching.

As for the foreground objects, the bonsai trunk is a cylinder that I scaled and
smoothed to the shape I wanted.  The foliage groups are particle clouds with
instanced geometry (they turned out better than I hoped).  All the other
objects are combinations of standard and extended objects manipulated by
vertices.  Once again, all the materials in the scene are procedural maps.