TITLE: Mandala
NAME: Andrew McNamara
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: andrew.mcnamara@whsmithnet.co.uk
TOPIC: Spirit of Asia
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mandala.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema 4DXL V7

TOOLS USED: 
    Cinema 4DXL V7

RENDER TIME: 
    About 1 hour

HARDWARE USED: 
    PIII 850, 256 MB RAM, Winfast 32MB Geforce2 Graphics card


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

An illustration of the far eastern concepts of yin and yang represented by the
ancient mandala symbol: light and dark, good and evil intertwined and
interdependent. I used dragons to give a physical representation of the concept
because they're a powerful symbol in almost all Asian (and non-Asian come to
think of it) mythologies, plus I just like dragons. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The dragons were modelled in Cinema 4D using subdivision surfaces (called
hyperNurbs in Cinema). They contain 21 bones from the head to the tail; the
high number was necessary to make the pose as snake like as possible. The pose
was achieved with a mixture of IK and FK. It took a few attempts to get them to
intertwine the way I wanted. I deliberately tried to make them appear
ornamental rather than truly organic and alive, I was trying for a kind of
partially statue-like appearance. The mandala was constructed by placing and
connecting points in an empty polygon object with a lathed spline for the rim
and was much more difficult to model than I expected (the dragons were a breeze
in comparison). The background flames are Cinema's in-built fire shader applied
to a single rectangular polygon. There are a total of 4 spot lights: 1 slightly
blue key light at the top, 1 deep red fill light at the bottom and two lights
aimed at the black dragon's head to provide more definition to the structure.
The key light is the only one with shadows activated, I used area shadows to
add some depth to the image although it more than tripled the render time and I
wouldn't recommend it for animation unless you've got a monster machine.





