TITLE: "Let's do the Time Rape again !"
NAME: SARAJA Olivier
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: olivier.saraja@free.fr
WEBPAGE: http://saraja.multimania.com/divers/blender.htm          http://www.blender-cafe.org

TOPIC: Contrast
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT
JPGFILE: timerape.jpg
ZIPFILE: timerape.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender v2.04

TOOLS USED: 
    Gimp for the textures and the signature, LParser

RENDER TIME: 
    around 5' minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD K6 2 350 MHz

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    In a park nearby an unnamed city, dinosaurians brought
back from the past dwells in peace.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

     It is my second submission for this IRTC round (contrast). At first, I
planned only to participate to only a round, but meanwhile, my research about
'realistic' distance/pollution fog in Blender made me modelling a landscape
(using heightmaps and the magnet tools, according to my tutorial on
http://www.blender-cafe.org), then adding a lake and some trees (l-systems
generated using lparser), and then some diplodoci in the lake. Then I
realized that I had a good submission topic at hand, and I quickly worked on
stegosauri (a DXF import) and pteranodons in order to build the whole
definitive scene.
      I used multiples textures and stencils with soft progression for mapping
the landscape terrain. A very good tutorial about using stencils is available
on Blendermania (http://www.blendermania.com). Everyone interested in
modelling/texturing terrains with Blender should pay attention to it.
       The distance fog (a very simple task, in fact) is made using the Mist
button from the World buttons, with the Quadratic option activated. The World
colour has been set to a light blue. Because of this, the sky is not generated
using the World buttons. Instead, I built a UVSphere with the clouds2.so
texture along with a blending to lighten the horizon color.
      The powerline is also a DXF import. Buildings are simple cubes
stretched along their height, with several textures outputed to col, nor, emit
and spec channels. These textures are issued from Strubi's free texture
database (http://honk.physik.uni-konstanz.de/~strubi/3d/index.html). All other
textures have been worked in the Gimp, and some are based on textures freely
available.
     Only items on the foreground was given shadows for two reasons : due to
the relatively high energy hemi lamp, shadows seen from a long distance
weren't clearly visible at all without forcing a lot the shadow pitch, which
wasn't artistically proper ; due to the various meshes depicting this scene, I
quickly reached my RAM memory and I needed to restrict somehow the memory
consumation. So I choosed to sacrify the far shadows.
     As a final point, the perspective is forced in this scene. The Stegosauri
on the foreground has been sized down, while those on the background has been
sized up. I love this trick ;o)

Best Regards,
Olivier

