TITLE: Anastasia's Nightmare
NAME: Lance Birch
COUNTRY: Australia
EMAIL: lance.birch@usa.net
WEBPAGE: http://come.to/the.zone
TOPIC: CONTRAST
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: lbana.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio MAX R2.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop 5.5 (for compression to JPEG)

RENDER TIME: 
    14 minutes 1 second

HARDWARE USED: 
    PIII 550 with 256 MB of RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Natural/Artificial, Life/Death, Heavens/Earth, Polluted/Clean

An oil processing and drilling station sits active in the middle of a vast hot
desert under the afternoon sky.  In a place where life has been crushed by the
harsh elements, only a single plant offering a lone exotic fruit bud strives to
grow.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


The image was built entirely with 3D Studio MAX R2.5.  Unfortunately I didn't
have the time to do what I wanted (due to school ending, suddenly getting a
website design job, and lots of other stuff).  I'm entering this competition in
what I believe is the spirit of the competition, that is, to have fun, and to
try to help other people by sharing how I made the image.

I went for a more artistic approach with this image than I have with previous
images that I've made.  Since the right hand side was very busy, I cleared the
left-hand side and made it sparse, with a single fruit plant growing out of the
hot soil.  The plant was box modeled, then noise was applied, and then the
whole mesh was smoothed.  The sky is a huge sphere with some UVW mapping and
turbulence (the sky is also 100% luminous).  The desert plane was created with
a huge box with a noise modifier applied to create the "dunes".  The factory
took a fair while to make, and consists of lots of cylinders, torii, spheres,
star extrusions, ngon extrusions and boxes.  Everything was then hand painted
using Photoshop.  The materials ended up having about five sub-layers.  The
base colour layer, the painted colour layer, mixed with an oxidised metal plate
image, which was then mixed with a mask to create oil stains.  On top of that
there was a shininess strength mask to make sure sections that were rusted
weren't shiny (which consisted of another mix map), and then a bump map on top
of that!  *phew*  Some of the more strangely shaped pipes I also did side
paints of in the same manner.  A lot of grit was added to the different layers
to make everything a little less clean, and noise modifiers were applied to
most of the geometry too so that everything wasn't so "perfect".  The "metal
grids" are boxes with multiple segments, which I then made a special wire map
for.  The sand was also painted!  (yes that's right I'm insane ;)  Of course I
didn't paint the whole thing, I just UVW mapped the section around the factory,
and painted that in Photoshop.  The painting was actually done to a mask, which
was then used with the UVW map to blend the standard sand material I made with
a black oil material I made.  This isn't very noticeable, but on the front-most
tank you'll see the pressure outlet pipe has a stain that runs down the tank,
and also out on to the ground.

The lighting was yet another nightmare.  There are several lights placed at
different angles, and all with different colours.  I wanted the sand dunes a
bright goldish orange, so they were exclusively lit by another light.  I also
made sure that the sand dunes wouldn't cast shadows on to themselves or other
objects because there were a lot of harsh brightness dropouts caused by it. 
The shadows of the factory take on a rusty red colour because the factory is
back lit by one of the ambient light sources for the sand dunes (since I didn't
want the sand to have any completely black sections).  Because the lights were
all different colours, it took a lot of time to get the factory the colour that
I wanted.  I really wanted to give the entire image a surreal feeling, so I
didn't want to go with standard rust colours and metal colours.  I wanted
something that would, not surprisingly enough, *contrast* with everything
else.

I deliberately made the top of the sky black so that the colour gradient would
really stand out against the orange sand dunes, as well as to leave room for
the stars that feature in the top of the image.  The stars are in the
arrangement of the Southern Cross that I see all the time here, and they become
the marking point for what I call the "contrast divider".  What I mean by this
is that if you cover up the image left of the Southern Cross, you'll see the
factory, then if you take that cover off and cover the opposite side you'll see
the lone fruit plant... if you give that a go on your screen, you'll really see
the contrast in the image.  I wanted to really emphasise the difference between
things that were artificial and things that were natural... so all the natural
things in the image have smooth shapes and clean textures, and all the
artificial things in the image have dirty textures and harsh geometry.

Now, I guess I should explain the smoke and flame effects.  These were created
volumetrically with FreePyro, a free plug in for MAX that creates volumetric
"clouds" around each particle in a particle system.  There are only three
particle systems in the scene, each with slightly different properties and
volumetric effects.  Also, all the smoke and steam volumetrics cast true
shadows both on to other objects, and themselves, while the flame volumetric is
self-illuminated.  All the particle systems have a turbulent wind spacewarp
bound to them to create the side drift that I wanted (the wide FOV of the
camera also really distorts the main smoke, which I think creates a nice look).
 The steam pipe particles systems were all the same particle system, but I made
them come out of different pipes by creating a particle array, and using the
top faces of the pipes are the distribution object.  This is because I didn't
want to have to recreate the particle systems and the FreePyro settings for
each of the pipes.

OK, that's a wrap, it's way too close to the deadline and I'm going down to the
beach to celebrate the new year, hehe, and new millennium ;)

