TITLE: Fire and Ice
NAME: Marlo Steed
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: marlo.steed@uleth.ca
WEBPAGE: http://www.uleth.ca/edu/faculty/members/steed/Multimedia.htm
TOPIC: Fire and Ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: fire_ice.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave

TOOLS USED: 
    Lightwave, primarily Modo for modeling

RENDER TIME: 
    seemed like an infinite amount of time

HARDWARE USED: 
    G5 Mac

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Some of you with a keen memory may have remembered a previous submision of mine
that had a simililarity to this one - theme - Spirit of Asia.

http://www.irtc.org/ftp/pub/stills/2001-12-31/dragon.jpg

The problem was for that round the final rendering never got done in time so I
had submitted a half baked job and the gamma setting was so out that no one
could see it anyway.  I was never happy with that, knowing what the final
render looked like:

http://www.uleth.ca/edu/faculty/members/steed/mltmedia/Images/Dragon.html

The final rendering looked so much better.  Ah well that is life.

However, when the topic of fire and ice came up I thought this was the perfect
way to recycle my model.  I got busy elaboraing the geomtry reworking the head
and body, fixing the textures, adding new geometry, and adding new lighting to
the scene - basically a totally new model and scene.  Creating the ice cubes,
etc.  So, here it for what it is worth.  I tried to add some puddles of water
but it hardly is visible, not sure how to deal with that given the lighting.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The image of Asia was drilled through an extruded plane for the hole in the
backdrop.  Rather than a light, I used global illumination and radiosity.  The
ice texture took quite a bit of tweaking by layering prcedural bump maps and
playing with glossiness and specularity.  The texures on the dragon are mainly
weight maps.  I also used a radial and noise falloff in Modo to create the
melting effect on the ice cubes, then added a weight map for the texture.

Let me know what you think.