TITLE: Mandala NAME: Andrew McNamara COUNTRY: United Kingdom EMAIL: andrew.mcnamara@whsmithnet.co.uk TOPIC: Spirit of Asia COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: mandala.jpg RENDERER USED: Cinema 4DXL V7 TOOLS USED: Cinema 4DXL V7 RENDER TIME: About 1 hour HARDWARE USED: PIII 850, 256 MB RAM, Winfast 32MB Geforce2 Graphics card IMAGE DESCRIPTION: An illustration of the far eastern concepts of yin and yang represented by the ancient mandala symbol: light and dark, good and evil intertwined and interdependent. I used dragons to give a physical representation of the concept because they're a powerful symbol in almost all Asian (and non-Asian come to think of it) mythologies, plus I just like dragons. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: The dragons were modelled in Cinema 4D using subdivision surfaces (called hyperNurbs in Cinema). They contain 21 bones from the head to the tail; the high number was necessary to make the pose as snake like as possible. The pose was achieved with a mixture of IK and FK. It took a few attempts to get them to intertwine the way I wanted. I deliberately tried to make them appear ornamental rather than truly organic and alive, I was trying for a kind of partially statue-like appearance. The mandala was constructed by placing and connecting points in an empty polygon object with a lathed spline for the rim and was much more difficult to model than I expected (the dragons were a breeze in comparison). The background flames are Cinema's in-built fire shader applied to a single rectangular polygon. There are a total of 4 spot lights: 1 slightly blue key light at the top, 1 deep red fill light at the bottom and two lights aimed at the black dragon's head to provide more definition to the structure. The key light is the only one with shadows activated, I used area shadows to add some depth to the image although it more than tripled the render time and I wouldn't recommend it for animation unless you've got a monster machine.