TITLE: Speed Kills
NAME: Robbert de Groot
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: zekaric@yahoo.ca
WEBPAGE: http://members.shaw.ca/zekaric
TOPIC: Speed
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rdgspeed.jpg
ZIPFILE: rdgspeed.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Carrara 4 Pro

TOOLS USED: 
    Carrara 4 Pro, Photoshop 5

RENDER TIME: 
    About 27 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Speed; exhilerating, thrilling and euphoric; but exercised without care can 
be devastating


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Tricycle, all ground objects and traffic sign were modelled in Carrara's 
vertex modeller.  The camera blur unfortunately hides all the hard work I put
into the tricycle.  Focal blur wasn't initially intended but I after I 
tried it, it seemed better.  Either that or I really wanted to try focal 
blur out.  It really prolongs the render time though.  Ouch.  The tricycle has
subtle damage done to it but that also is lost with the focal blur.  Also
looking at it again, without focal blur it may have still been too subtle.

The plants to the side were modelled by Carrara's plant editor.  Not much
to say about this other than I needed something to fill that space.  Yes, sad
to say, it's blatant filler.

The shaddow of the tree was initially one of Carrara's plant editor objects but
that resulted in something that looked too inorganic; branches were too 
straight and wiry,  so I stepped outside and took a picture of one of the big
trees outside my front door.  That ended up with a much better result.  
The geometry is pretty simple, it's just a polygon textured with the image.

I did have bump mapping on the objects but that ended up looking like rubbish
with the focal blur.  So I rerendered without.  The scene comes off
a bit computery but then, it sort of works, I think, because it's far from
being realistic anyway.  The action and content is more important than the 
realism.  (I think.  Feel free to disagree.)

Photoshop was only used to create the textures.  In the case of the pavement
the mask for the tire tread.  For the tree shadow, processing the digital
photo to be high contrast black and white to be used as an alpha mask.  Only
post process was to convert the final image from BMP to JPG.

Zip file if it made the upload holds the textures used as well as the Carrara
scene file.

Nitpick my own work:  Well, also a nitpick from a showing to a friend.  The
skid mark isn't really accurate.  Skidding wouldn't show the tire tread like
that.  So the car either has bad breakes or is actually pealing off.  In 
actuallity this mark is probably for someone that is pealing away instead of
stopping.  If he were stopping it's probably end up with a really dark spot at
the end instead of fading away as it's shown in the image.  Ooops.

The shadow of the tree is bare...  So possibly fall.  Yet the bushes are still
leafy and a lush green; a harty plant?  At any rate, it adds to the computery 
feel, good or bad.  

I'm no Giles Tran but I hope I'm going in the right direction.

I hope you've enjoyed the picture none the less.