TITLE: The Aral Sea
NAME: Chris
COUNTRY: UK
EMAIL: c.bunker@plymouth.ac.uk
TOPIC: The Sea
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: aral.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave 5.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop (for bump maps, colour maps)

RENDER TIME: 
    46 minutes 22 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    G3 300MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A picture of the sea without a drop of water as the Aral sea
used to be a large inland sea in the former Soviet Union, because of the Soviet
attempts to create a cotton growing industry upstream from it, and the massive
amounts of water that this absorbed, a large percentage of the sea has now
dried out leaving the former fishing communities that lived around it, and
their boats high and dry . In this image I wanted to try and show the the
fragility of the world and how in quite a short space of time we can create
dramatic changes to our environment, changes that are not always for the best .
I used the image of a fishing boat coming home with a full load and surrounded
by a flock of seagulls, hoping to steal some of that load, as a good prosperous
image of good fortune . Then I twisted it, changing the sea to land and the
seagulls to vultures, the circling presence of whom is a used as a symbol of
death in many a western . I hope this juxtaposition of the too different
feelings will reinforce one another . 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    First I built the fishing boat as this
was to be the forcus of the scene and would therefore control the feel of
everything else around it . Next I produced a very simple ground plain to rest
it of . At this point I set up how these major models where positioned and lit
. In texturing them I did the ground first by trying to make it look like an OK
seascape by giving it a multitude of bump maps, colour maps, and defuse maps .
Then I changed the colours of the colour maps from blues to yellows, and got
rid of all the specular . After this nowing the scale I was working to I built
my vulture, this are of a very low detail, as I new that they would only just
be seen and therefore a high detail would not be needed . This and several
copies, where imported into my scene along with an equally low detail set of
mountains for the backdrop . I added a light yellow fog to simulate a dusty
enviroment and the natural fogging that always occours when looking accross a
large distance . All that was then needed was to play with the rendering
settings to to create the final image .
                                         h   h   F                              
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                    H         Monaco g__     _
tk  _
g__    
u     L O _ _ L O _ ____v          _   _          R*ch _     H H     ( 0____ >
A,  x _     h h     _
_     d            '                 0           ____ 6 E                    
Monaco                                                                         
                                                                               
                                                                               
                             Helvetica                                         
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                             Confidential                      
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                                        _   _  
_   _                  H                                                       
                                                     h   h   F
g__ _     F  MPSR    BBST     ___         ___   L
g__                                              

