EMAIL:sammy@cube.net
NAME: Sammy Fischer
TOPIC: ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: literate ruins
COUNTRY:Germany
WEBPAGE: http://home.talkcity.com/GalleryDr/schnoet
RENDERER USED: Maxon Cinema4D XL
TOOLS USED: Organica, Corel Textures, Corel Photopaint, Poser
RENDER TIME: 1 hour 26 Minutes
HARDWARE USED: Dual P3-500 w\384MB Ram
IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Nothing really fancy I'm afraid ... Just the ruins of an old anonymous medieval castle in some 
even more non-descript swamplike country.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
I first had the idea of building really old dead trees with  morph objects. I then added the ground (deformed plane)
and a (originaly higher) water ground. the gras was done using the Hair Department Plugin for Cinema4D XL. (There are 
3 different forms and size of gras for each patch, which explains why it takes so long to render the image)
This was the moment I had the completely unoriginal idea of adding the ruins of a castle and submit it to the irtc.

The castle itself, although not quite functional  (you couldn't make an Unreal map from it), is quite detailled. There are 
stairways in all towers (you can see the rest of one in the right tower), doors, walkways, etc... I then used randomly deformed 
balls to destroy parts of the castle. 

Next came the skeleton (which was exported from poser) and the clouds (yes! There are clouds, though I suppose they are only visible
at depth >=24bit. Yet they give some structure to the (fog) background)

The bird was created in Organica and textured using fractal clouds rendered in Corel Texture, and some hand-drawn textures for the beak 
and the feets. It was supposed to be a raven. Sadly, closeup shows that it's somewhere between a raven a crow and a non-descript black bird ;) 
(You can see a closeup of the standing bird on my homepage). I'm still extremely pleased by the way it turned out though.
I did a second model, which received bones in C4D, and used for the spread-wings birds. (Which also looks quite cool, but I've not 
saved any close-up renderings yet.)

I then worked on the ground fog (composed of 30 interlocking elongated balls with only a dark grey fog as texture).

Lastly I experienced with the lighting (2 lights, one of which casts soft shadows), added a few props (the wheel and some other stuff 
which can only be seen  if you know exactly what to look for... don't bother!;) and the small hills in the background.

Most time went into the bird and the castle by the way.

The image was cropped (originaly rendered at 1152x864 ... but I won't have time to render it at 800x600 until tuesday, sorry :\, and my sig was added. 
(both in Corel Photopaint). There was no other post-processing done.