TITLE: Playing With Fire With a Little Bit Of Ice
NAME: Robbert de Groot
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: zekaric@yahoo.ca
WEBPAGE: http://members.shaw.ca/zekaric
TOPIC: Fire and Ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rdgfandi.jpg
ZIPFILE: rdgfandi.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Carrara 4 Pro

TOOLS USED: 
    Carrara 4 Pro, Paint Shop Pro 5

RENDER TIME: 
    About half and hour

HARDWARE USED: 
    Intel Celeron 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Who says there can't be some practical joking in Hell...  Think of the 
retribution!


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I initially had a different 
idea of what image would be and my initial
thought was that since the characters, yeah plural, were more cartooney
that they would be a heck of a lot easier to make than something that was
more realistic...  Well it probably is easier but it still took me quite
a bit of time to do the one character and thinking about finishing the others
in the time frame probably wasn't in the cards.  I still like look of the
devil but I know there are areas that I would like it to be better.  It's 
close to what I was thinking but not totally exact.  But anyway, it's all
a learning process.

Everthing in the scene except for the snowball, yes that's suppose to be a 
snowball, and the crown is done in the vertex modeller in Carrara.  The floor,
the column base and the back wall are displacement mapped using Digital
Carvers Guild plugin for Carrara, so the actual geometry is fairly simple
in comparison to what you are actually seeing.  The snake like part of the 
column was also fairly simple to create, lofting a circle up a spiral and 
then selecting all the faces and extruding them. Keen eyes, or maybe not so
keen, will notice that they are actually just flat faces but the shading or
normals makes them appear a bit like they are rounded.

The displacement mapping works most of the time but you can see some errors.
I've tried to get rid of them, there were more, by reducing the amount of 
displacement but as you can see the floor still sufferes from some spots
on the edges of the stones.  This seems like a bug of sorts with the plugin.
Pity, it did most everything else ok.  I'll also point out another bug that
you might not see as one is that slab between the brick of the column base 
and the snake pillar.  The black edge on the top of that slab was 
unintentional and basically the same displacement map bug.  At some point
you just have to stop battling with the program and move on.

The crown is bunch of 'fire' primitives that Carrara has internally.  I was
going for Hellboy's like idea with that.  

The snowball is a metaball object in Carrara.  I thought about adding motion 
blur to it but seeing the rest of the image isn't perfect and I was somewhat
losing the battle with Carrara in what I wanted to get I left it as is.

About 9 lights mainly and not a whole lot to say about that.  I think you 
can figure out what colour they are. 

The textures are all procedural and one or two parts coming from one or
two other Digital Carvers Guild's plugins.  

Paint Shop Pro to convert to jpg only.

My own nitpicks.  A little darker than it should probably be.  The black spots
that I've mentioned above.  Possibly more exaggeration on the pose of the 
little guy would be better.  A bit monochomatic.  The floor could use some
work.  Floor with the base of the wall and pillars could use some work as it
looks cheaply done.

Anyhoo,  I hope you like it and got the impression that I was hoping to convey
and that was that the devil getting smacked with a snowball.