TITLE: Paradise Lost
NAME: Alexander Ebel
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: alexander.ebel@online.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.desert-of-the-real.de
TOPIC: Loneliness
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ae_lost.jpg
RENDERER USED: 

    Virtualight 1.2 (http://www.3dvirtualight.com)


TOOLS USED: 

    Maya 4.0


RENDER TIME: 

    aprox. 4 hours


HARDWARE USED: 

    AMD Athlon XP 1700



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


For me, loneliness is when your loved sweetheart someday tells you "I don't love
you anymore!" and then he/she leaves you! This feeling can't be described by
words, so I use this picture. I think, everybody who had this experience knows
what I'm talking about. I can't tell why this picture should be so as it is. It
was an emotional decision. It came directly from my heart. All I had to do, was
to bring it into the computer. So, for me, loneliness looks like this.





DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Everything but the girl, the ashtray and the cup is made of polygon-objects.
Everything else is made of nurbs-objects. I've just started to work with Maya
(used Moray and the great POVRay before) and have just a few experiences with
it. This is my first "bigger" picture, made with it. I needed a week or so, to
figure everything out (well, not quite everything <g>). It's amazing how fast
you can produce really cool things with it. But I didn't use the (very fast)
internal Maya-renderer because it doesn't supports global illumination. And I
wanted that for that image. I also wanted that blurred reflections on the
ground. I used fairly simple shaders. The image's magic comes from it's "cool"
lighting. So I used the quite good (and free) renderer Virtualight. It has a
good connection to Maya and supports everything I wanted. But unfortunately
there wasn't the time to render a more beautiful bigger version. I started a
render-job with real good settings for image size and quality. But after a day
of rendering I realized that it wouldn't be finished until the deadline. So I
started a new render-job with these small settings. Global
illumination-calculations are very time-consuming (if you want to make really
"real" looking images with it). But I'll make a bigger version (and let the
computer work for a week or so) and put it on my website. BTW: The picture on
the wall is an oil-painting from the great American realist Edward Hopper and
it's called "New York Movie". I felt it would support the impression of
loneliness, because it has in it self a very lonely mood. But even though I
tried to get the real sizes of the real picture right (32 1/4 x 40 1/8 inches),
it's unfortunately not the real one. ;-) This is in the The Museum of Modern
Art in New York. ...but what is "real" anyway? Do you know it? Come to my
website and check it out.