EMAIL: jsgcowley@yahoo.co.uk NAME: John Cowley TOPIC: Frozen Moment COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Corporate Dynasty COUNTRY: England WEBPAGE: none RENDERER USED: Lightwave 3d 7.5 TOOLS USED: Lightwave, Rglight (lightwave plugin), Corel Draw 10 RENDER TIME: 6m 58s (antialiasing: low, "glow effect") buld time +/- 2 weeks, plus a million and one test renders. HARDWARE USED: AMD Thunderbird 1.4Ghz, 384MB DDR, GeForce 2 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: I didn't know whether to enter this into the IRTC until I saw the contest title, So I used my skyscraper model and made the image. The thunder cracks before the storm, a second of light, an eternal testement to the power of nature. Frozen in the eyes of the beholder, illuminating the heavens and the dark factory, shattering the pounding and grinding of the machines, for one brilliant second, man is reminded of his inferiority to the universe that created him. It is strange how when a lightning bolt strikes everything seems to freeze for a second, I thought it would make the perfect subject for this topic. DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: I didn't really know where to go with my skyscraper model, I am just a suppressed architect, so I often make things that I don't really know where I am going. Basically I made one side of the skyscraper with bevels and extrudes, and mirrored it. Then I made the 'factory' area, using similar methods. Texturing is quite simple as it was always designed to go into a dark scene, so I basically used procedurals in the various texture channels, tweaking continuousely the specular and diffuse values, and textures to get the lighting just right. Once I was satisfied with the skyscraper, and the buildings surrounding it, I went on to model the spaceship. It too is quite a simple concept, basically I wanted a bulky 'transport' looking ship, not some huge weapon of destruction. It turned out surprisingly well, and I used simple texturing methods on it as well, since it is not too detailed. There are lots of lights(25), and luminous textures in this scene. The lights add to the overall atmosphere, and feel, but not the lighting, as they (except the lightning light) all have a falloff value, their purpose is to illuminate the little area they are near, and give a feeling of the factory continuous use. And of course to be dwarfed by the immensity of the lightning bolt. The really tricky bit was getting really dark, contrasted shadows, without brightning the scene to much. The answer? set ambient intensity values in the negative. I wasn't quite sure what light source to use for the lightning, but I ended up having to use a distant light, and it's intensity was set high, with a lightly blue colour. The lightning was unbelievably easy to do. I downloaded the RGlight plugin for the lightning, read the manual (which annoyingly didn't show how to texture) and with a little tweaking was satisfied. I made the texture luminous and added a glow to it, the blue tint was a pretty lucky thing to get, the lightning wasnt exactly white(plae blue), but the luminosity nulled that, so the only blue that remained was in the glow. The sky; this was a challenge. Being pretty new to lightwave, I forced myself to learn how to use gradients, because I have never had any success with the various environment plugins (skytracer, skygen etc..). Basically I made a giant tesselated sphere, flipped the polys, and after about 2 hours managed to get a wicked cloud texture. Once more luminosity was set high, and diffuse low. -Final Note- I did try adding mountains in the background, to add a sense of scale, but realised that by using a distant light they would be too well illuminated for the scene, and entirely black, they wouldn't stand out successfully. This was a great learning experience for me, and I hope you enjoyed viewing (and hopefully voting for) my picture, as much as I enjoyed making it. This is my first entry to the IRTC. I would have added "vector blur" to the final image, to add to the tension of the scene, but it is forbidden by the rules of this comptetition. *sniff* If you want to see the various carnations of this image, check out my gallery at renderosity -