TITLE: Sword in Stone
NAME: Brian White
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: white@rational.com
TOPIC: Fantasy and Mystic
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: bawsword.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Lightwave 6.5b

TOOLS USED: 
    Lightwave 6.5b

RENDER TIME: 
    20 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    PII, 128MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

In one legend, Arthur son of Uther Pendragon drew Excalibar from where it had
been
locked in a stone.  In another, he attempted to wield supreme executive power 
because some watery tart threw it at him.  You decide...

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This image was a good next step in my learning Lightwave.  Everything, except
the background,
was modeled from scratch.  The sword is based on a tutorial found in "Applied
Lightwave 3D".
I spent a lot of time tweaking the textures.  The idea for the clover came from
Flemming's,
"Advanced 3D Photorealism Techniques".  The book discussed creating a tilable,
low-polygon
count clover patch.  I wanted loosely clustered clovers on a rock.  I created a
single clover
cluster of four leaves and stem, then created the rock.  I selected the points
on top of the
rock object, cut them and pasted them into a new object.  Then selected a
random, subset of
these points.  A tool I found hidden in Lightwave is called point-clone-plus. 
This tool 
allows you to duplicate an object whereever there are points in a background
layer (one 
object per point).  You can also randomly scale and rotate these duplicates in
the same step.
Once done, this gave me a random patch of clovers that sat perfectly on top of
the rock
object.  The background is a digital photograph of the blue gum forest near
Syndey 
Australia, that I took while backpacking (a.ka. bushwalking).  I fully intended
to replace
this with actual 3D models, but time failed me.  Matching the lighting between
model and
background proved to be a bit of a challange, but I like the result.

