TITLE: The Bridge
NAME: Richard Sutherland
COUNTRY: US
EMAIL: rich@brickbots.com
TOPIC: Spectacular Landscapes
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rpaz_ls.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Final Render

TOOLS USED: 
    3d Studio

RENDER TIME: 
    7 53

HARDWARE USED: 
    733mhz Athalon, 384mb ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Land bridges are an amazing sight.  This one was created by the ,now, meandering
river flowing through the desolate valley.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Noise, Noise, Noise... The two canyon walls,and the far bit in the distance
started as boxes.  They were subdivided, edited for shape, and then highly
tesselated. 

The ground is a plane that was subdivided and mesh edited using soft selections
to scult the bed of the river.  The river is a standard ol' plane.

The bridge was extruded from the wall and shaped a bit by hand.

Large scale noise with a scaled gizmo was applied to get the horizontal shelving
effect on the walls.  Scaling the noise gizmo forced the normally bumpy noise
deformation into a horizontal sort of shelf arrangement (the bumps were
streached extreamly in the x/y direction).  A mesh select was used to limit the
noise to just the vertical wall portion, not the arch/bridge.

More tesselation, and a much smaller noise was applied to all rock surface.

The small rocks are a particle system using the ground plane as an emiter.  They
are meta particles with a low detail for the sharp-look.

The large rocks are also a particul system using the rock at the left edge of
the screen as instanced geometry.  The rotation/scaling and noise phase were
randomized for each large rock.

The rock textures are multi-layered, mainly streaks running horizontally with a
gradient running from the top to the bottom to lighten the rock walls towards
the bottom. Large noise was composited over the whole texture to provide
variation in the shading.  A burnished metail bump map was used on all the
rocks.

The water is raytraced reflections with a ripple bump map.

There is a single light, set to simulate the sun. 3ds has a type of light that
is not a true area light, but all rays are parallel to simulate a very far off
light (no cone, just an area of affect).  Raytraced shawdows were used to be
sure all the little rocks and nooks and crannies were shadowed correctly.

Some distance fog was used, and the background is a gradient going from blue on
top, to white on the bottom.  Turbulence was added to the gradient to make it
'cloudy'

I used final render for it's fast and reasonably good looking Global
Illumination. I could have added lights to simulate the ground bounce, but true
computed GI just looks more believable. 

