TITLE: The Big Moment
NAME: Richard Sutherland
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: rich@brickbots.com
TOPIC: Frozen Moment
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rpaz_fro.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Blender Publisher 2.25

TOOLS USED: 
    Blender Publisher 2.25

RENDER TIME: 
    ~10 mins

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athalon 733, 384mb ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Which moment to freeze?  Well how about the moment of conception!  Spermatozoa
meets ovum. 

This was an interesting image to make.  There are all sorts of images of cells
and such, but most are bland, or false color images.  Photorealism was not
really an option as there are no good photographs of what this would look like
inside a body.  There are pictures and movies of this event in a dish, or other
piece of laboratory glass, but this is not the moment I wanted to capture.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

This was my first still project in Blender Publisher.  I've used 3ds Max quite a
bit, but it was hard to find time to use it at my work.  With blender now an
open source project, I decided to take the plunge and learn the interface and
make it work.  

The tissue wall on the left side is a plane, subdivided fractal, then smooth,
then tweaked at the vertex level, then subdivided to smooth the whole thing
out.  A stucci (a blender procedural texture) texture finished it off.

The egg is a sphere with some stucci and cloud bump mapping. The haze/glow
around it is the same sphere duplicated, subdivided fractal with a Halo
material (the halo material in blender produces a faded sphere/lens flair at
each vertex location, it is tough to describe). 

The sperm are spheres with extruded sections for the tail. I duplicated, change
the tail, duplicated, etc.  They have a noise and stucci bump map applied.

I rendered the whole thing with fog to make it look murky.  The effect did not
look quite right, even with a cloud texture in the fog.  To get around this and
make the fade off more obvious I duplicated the tissue wall and turned it into
a particle emitter to fill the volume with small particles to make the fade off
more apparent and to give it even more of a murky inside the body feel.

The whole thing looked very static, so I keyed some movement of the sperm and
rendered it with motion blur to give it some life.  Finally, I wanted some film
grain.  It is not a photorealistic render, but film grain still looks good. 
Nothing is ever as perfect as CG so I find film grain adds quite a bit. 
Blender does not have a film grain plugin (at least not one I could find) and I
did not want to cheat and post-process in The Gimp so I made a plane in
blender, applied the rendered image as a texture map, made it self illuminating
and mixed in a small amount of noise to the material.  I then rendered this
plane for the final image.  Not quite as good as real film grain plugins, but
it does enhance the image!

