TITLE: dawn over the channel
NAME: James Radvan
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: james@imperiumglobal.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.internetmovieproject.com
TOPIC: Warfare
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: channel.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3dsmax 4.0 default scanline

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop 6 for textures

RENDER TIME: 
    6 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon 1.2 / 512 DDR / ATi Radeon 32MB / Wacom Intuos A5 tablet


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    Dawn over the English Channel, as seen from an Allied
submarine in WWII.  Two Spitfires overfly a ship recently torpedoed by the
sub.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

It started with inspiration from an image I found on Corbis.  I wanted to avoid
any connection to the recent troubles, so a nondescript event from WWII seemed
the least offensive.
The water is composed of three instances of a noised mesh plane - a lower one
for the green tinge, a middle one for the blue (slightly transparent) and an
upper for a foam layer.  The shader for the water is complex - a combination of
falloff and various noise/reflection/refraction maps to create the multi-layer
ripples.  Of all the objects in the scene, it took the longest to tweak and I'm
still not 100% happy with it.  It's meant to be a reasonable swell (open ocean)
but not too choppy (early morning).
the ship is made of various primitives and lofts - the holes in the bow are
simple booleans.  The materials on the ship are pretty rudimentary, but I think
they work well enough from that distance and the angle.
I'm most proud of the Spitfires.  They were made with Max's surface tools (DO
THE RHINO HEAD TUTORIAL!).  The fuselage and canopy took the longest; after
that the wings, tailplanes and accessories were a doddle.  The textures on the
Spitfires are complete though lack dirt maps etc as they were not needed due to
the distance.  They were modelled from a 1:72 scale Revell plastic model kit
that I bought specially for this project.  I would definitely recommend
modelling from plastic kits if you're building anything that needs to be
accurately proportioned.  The canopies are reflection mapped to get the nice
reflective highlights.  The planes were modelled separately and xref'ed into
the scene.
The sky is a default Max map that I initially put in as a placeholder.  I was
going to photograph one specially, but at the final render stage it actually
surprised me by looking pretty good, so I kept it.
The smoke plume is a couple of default Max particle clouds.  Nothing
spectacular, just fractal noise and  grey/brown colouring.  It's meant to be a
small, weakened fire - almost out, thus emphasising the 'almost dead' nature of
the ship (hence the fairly weak red/orange light).  The sparseness of the smoke
emphasises this as well as reinforcing the morning calm.
There's a little bit of environment fog to fill out the morning haze, and I'm
using deeply blue/green coloured ambient light for the shadows.  Lighting is
otherwise all shadow-mapped omnis.  There are a red and an orange for the fire
(I like the orange on the nose of the right-hand Spitfire), a light blue
overhead for the sky, and a greeny/blue gobo projecting the caustic onto the
bow of the ship.  I think that's it.  I originally had some spots highlighting
various parts of the scene, like the underside of the Spits and the ocean, but
I like it better like this.
The render is Max scanline, with motion blur on the propellors. The sighting
reticle and periscope shroud are composited in Max Video Post using two
successive instances of the alpha compositor, and the whole thing is finished
off with a film grain to emphasise both the age (WWII) and the fact that it is
seen through a periscope.
There's nothing here that couldn't have been done with a cheaper package - I
just made the decision to buy Max 1 all those years ago when I needed it for
clients and have upgraded as I went.  Don't bash me too hard for using
commercial software :)

Thanks to Ronnie (www.skyraider3d.com) for inspiration with the Spitfires, and
also to the guys/gals at www.maxforums.org.

Email me for the source file if you like.

Cheers, James

james@imperiumglobal.com
http://www.internetmovieproject.com