TITLE: Volcano.jpg
NAME: David A. DeFreese
EMAIL: defreese@alumni.princeton.edu
TOPIC: Imaginary Worlds
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: volcanic.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Ray Dream Studio 5

TOOLS USED: 
    4Elements (Earth, Wind, Fire), CorelDraw 6 for jpg conversion and
copyright info

RENDER TIME: 
    35 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    233MHz G3 PowerMac

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This was the better concept out of a few that I tried.
Oddly enough, my wife and I have very different perceptions of what this image
means.  I first composed the image as what I could imagine Hell to look like
complete with fire, brimstone, and hellfire.  My wife, the optimist, thought it
looked more like the birth and development of a planet.  Different
perspectives- Yin and Yang.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I originally wanted to just test some concepts with Rayflects 4Elements for Ray
Dream Studio.  Some of the effects worked out well (like the volcano, the lava,
the geyser, etc.)  according to what I thought I could do with my skill set.

First, I created a simple landscape of a terrain (4Elements Earth) for the
cooling lava flow and the atmosphere (4Elements Wind).  The cooling lava sea
uses the RDS cellular component for the color,  transparency, bump, shininess,
highlight and glow.  Underneath the lava is a flat plane with a simple base
color and matching glow.  Also in the basic terrain is a low level terrain
element (4E Earth), a distant mountain range (4E Earth) and a lumpy, wispy Fog
element.

The volcanic elements are 4E Earth again with craters carved into them.  Inside
the craters are glowing spheres (for the pooling lava), fire elements, and
several fountain elements for the geysers.  The main weakness for the fountain
particle effect is that the particles are all triangles, so I had to make the
particle size very small to minimize the result or very large to create an
overlap of the particles.

I used another Rayflect plug-in 'Aura' to give all of the glowing elements a
'real' glow.  This highlighted the terrain beneath the lava sea, implying that
there is a still molten sea beneath the cooling lava terrain.  It also helped
improve the volcanic geysers along with the lava colored lights embedded
throughout the geysers.

