TITLE: Amber
NAME: Sammy Fischer
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: sammyf@wanadoo.fr
WEBPAGE: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sammyf
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sf_amber.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Maxon Cinema 4D XL

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel Photopaint

RENDER TIME: 
    17'07''

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Insects who get caught in resin which subsequently turns to amber let us witness
a still of the moment of their death.

The truth is that I had built these two strange looking trees, thought about
doing a slightly alien jungle scene, looked up IRTC and found out that I
actually had an idea involving 

a) a Slightly Alien Jungle (tm)
b) some kind of frozen moment.

That was in the very first hours of December, 30th ... no excuse for a rushed
project, but at least an explanation ;)


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The trunks of the trees are made of loft nurbs. The thorns are originally all
identical loft nurbs arranged around a circle. I then used the magnet to give
them the appearance of gravity. I then used duplicates of the original trees
and altered their size and rotation. All in all there 3 different tree types
(Although 2 are VERY similar) and one kind of flower bush (can be seen
somewhere as a reddish spot near the ground).
The trunk in the foreground is unique (aka : it doesn't belong to one of the
afore-mentioned tree-types) is also a loft nurbs with a trunk texture applied
to it. The ivy is applied as an additional texture. 
There is also a duplicate, slightly larger version of the trunk with a rotated
version of the ivy texture applied to it, to give the impression of depth.
The amber and the insect are  NURB objects (both based on a cube). The wings are
deformed planes with a wing texture applied to them.
NOTE : there are around 20 balls of 98%-transparent nonrefractive air inside the
amber.

Field Blur was applied by the renderer. I added my sig and increased the
brightness of the picture using Corel Photopaint.