TITLE: Fallback
NAME: Sammy Fischer
COUNTRY: France
EMAIL: sammyf@wanadoo.fr
WEBPAGE: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sammyf
TOPIC: Old Technology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sf_fallb.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Maxon Cinema 4D XL

TOOLS USED: 
    Corel Photopaint

RENDER TIME: 
    2h 03' 59'' at 1152x864

HARDWARE USED: 
    Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

When the natural oil ressources have been depleted (and, just for the sake of
esthetics, the sea has raised due to golbal warming, and thus flooded most
coasts), the human race will have to fall back to old technologies, like horses
and balloons, for individual travel.
There are actually a few technologies shown which could be rated as ~old~. First
of all, of course the horses pulling the two car, then the mongolfi_res in the
sky (without oil, there won't be many ways to let planes fly). The bike, though
still in use, might become more important in such times, and so is sailing
(although bigger ships could be powered with nuclear energy, I can't picture it
being used in personal transportation).
The windmills to create electricity do already exist, but the technology itself
is quite old.
I also put some new technology (the solar car) for the sake of realism. Speaking
of realism :  such a bridge can't be built, as it's just way too long. Also,
I'm not too sure about one single horse pulling a SUV, even if you removed the
engine, for any longer period of time.

Btw, I should point out, that I had the idea for the picture BEFORE hearing of
the SUV - Oil for War spot that has been shown on US-networks.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


* the city is just a considerable amount of textured boxes.

* the waterand the clouds are  just  textured ground objects.

* the bridge is mostly made up of primitives. The trusses (the Xs supporting the
main pillars) were created using a bitmap transformed to a spline, and then
extruded. Note that they are only present on the two nearest sections of the
bridges, due to some memory issue. The ~ropes~ are just circles slong a spline.
I created one section of the bridge, then made 20 copies of it, and edited the
18 sections that are the farther away so that they didn't include small
details, which wouldn't show anyway.

* the solar car is composed of an hypernurb for the body, and lots of primitives
for the transmission, wheels, aso ...

* the sailboats are hypernurbs (yeah ... I could have used primitives and you
wouldn't have noticed ,)

* the sails for the sailboats are nurb-patches.

* the balloons are hypernurbs objects for the ballon body, the cabins are mostly
primitives and the ropes are extruded circles.

* the bike, the windskate (which, and of course you can't see it, are both quite
detailed;), and the windmills are also only composed of primitives. the small
islands beneat the windmills are procedural fractal landscape iwth only 10x10
polygons. (at this point I had already found out, that most details would be
lost anyway;)

*I modelled the guy pulling the SUV and the guy on the skateboard using
Hypernurbs. they are quite detailled and boned, but ... well ... you just can't
see it in THAT particular picture. I might use them in later entries so perhaps
you'll get a chance sometime ;)

* The head and hair of the woman driving the solar car was modeled using
Hypernurbs, I then used the body of a zygote female model included in C4D, as I
realised that you don't really see her anyway ;)

* the people IN the cars, the balloons and the sailboats (which, incidentally,
you can't really see neither) are all zygote models.

* The two ~real~ cars and the horse model were downloaded from 3dcafe.com . I
added the texture, and (no pun intended) boned the horse, so that it didn't
always have the same posture (it ended up with a similar position though, as it
... well .. just looked better:\

* 2 lights were used. A hard shadow casting sun with a light blue tint (produces
 better daylight-like light), and a darker non shadow casting one to keep the
scene from getting .. well .. too dark.

* oh yeah .. there is a plane with a white (bottom) to dark blue (top)
alpha-gradient between the camera and the rest of the objects. I wanted to
create some colored filter. Due to this, I couldn't use Object Motion Blur in
C4D, as it is a post-effect, and doesn't work for objects which are ~obscured~
by others. So I had to use scene motion blur (9x), which accounts for the high
rendering time. That and the 130MB the scene (without textures) takes up on my
HD.

I'm aware, that the view isn't the best I could have used. I tried rendering a
better picture (with more objects and a slightly different camera position)
tonight, but we just had two consecutive power-shortages, so I'm giving up :\
One final remark : as you might have gathered from all this, most of the objects
I modelled for this picture are quite detailled, but you seldom can notice in
this particular entry. I don't exactly regret it (although it might have
reduced the rendering time a lot if things had been less detailled;), as I can
reuse most of them in later pictures. 
Oh yeah ... and for once I didn't reuse older objects. Everything that wasn't
borrowed (zygote and 3Dcafe thingies) was created for THIS entry.

Signature added and picture resized in Corel Photopaint.

