EMAIL: agage@csee.usf.edu
NAME: Aaron Gage
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Morning
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.csee.usf.edu/~agage
RENDERER USED: Lightwave 5.6
TOOLS USED: ImageMagick to convert to JPEG, the GIMP for a noise clipmap
RENDER TIME: 25 hours
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 600, 128MB RAM
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: Relatively dark, at least in the shadow regions
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

The sun has just risen above the horizon, warming what remains of an old
dwelling.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

This image was done totally within Lightwave.  Below, I will describe
briefly how the wall, tree, and grass were made.

There are 54 or so different models of rocks, each of which was made in
Modeller (starting with a roughly cubic block, and using MetaNURBS to
deform it while keeping it smooth).  Once converted back to a triangle
mesh, the points were jittered along their normals a small amount to
give the rock a rough look.  I placed a total of 140+ rocks by hand to
create the wall, choosing from the 54 models randomly and transforming
them until they would fit.  The moss between the rocks was made by
first placing a number of boxes into Layout in order to get the general
shape of the wall, then using these in Modeller as a background while I
made a MetaNURBS object of the same shape.  This allowed me to fill in any
gaps in the wall without making the moss/mortar look flat.

The tree is largely off-camera, but it was made using tips found at flay.com.
I started with a cone that was tapered to the right shape, then removed the
topmost segments.  These were copied into different layers, then deformed
a bit and merged together on the trunk.  This process was repeated many
(many many) times until there were adequate branches.  The splits on some
of the lower branches were also edited to make them more realistic than
two cones intersecting.  For leaves, I started with the points at the ends
of each branch, and tried using these as the centers of spheres (of leaves).
This worked fairly well, but ended up creating far too many polygons.  I ended
up using the resulting shape as a guide for making a simpler MetaNURBS
leaf object.  Once I had roughly the right volume, I jittered the points
dramatically (which had a very interesting effect), then textured the
object to the color of leaves, and applied a Vein clipmap.  I tried using
a transparency map instead of the clipmap, but Steamer would not work well
this way.

The grass was inspired by some discussion on a Lightwave newsgroup, and
was done by a method they were calling Pancake Voxels.  It basically works
like this: take many layers of polygons (in this case, the shape of the
ground, for a total of 20 layers) that are separated by a very small
distance (1mm in this case).  Apply a planar clipmap of some sort (in
this case, from above, using a fractal noise pattern).  The result?  It
is as though this volume of polygons has had thousands of holes poked
through it, leaving behind what looks deceptively like grass.  It requires
very few extra polygons, and makes for a decent effect.

The weeds and fern were created in Modeller, mostly through trial and error.
The hills were made by taking a large plane, subdividing the areas that would
be on-camera, and applying a jitter along the point normals until I got
what I wanted.  The mushrooms were also fairly easy to model, but ended
up being largely hidden.  The fog was provided by Steamer, and the sky
by SkyTracer.  All textures were original.

While I am generally pleased with this image, there are still some areas
that could use work (or at least some extra details).  I like the grass
effect, but would like to find a way to make it stand out in 3D better.
As it stands, this scene contains 222 objects made of 182571 points connected
into 217844 polygons.