TITLE: Still-Life with Flower
NAME: Michael Hunter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: intertek@one.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net         http://www.interactivetechnologies.net/making_of_Mystery/index.htm

TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: flower.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio Max Version 5.1

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps), Simbiont plug-in
(http://www.darksim.com/)

RENDER TIME: 
    9 Minutes 25 seconds @ 1047 x 2000

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 261 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I have been asked what does my picture mean. This question makes me feel a bit
uncomfortable since I don't know. This time around I tried to let the image
lead its own creation. When it suggested a good idea or complained about some
detail I tried to listen carefully and act upon it. I didn't impose any
preconceived notion of what this image was supposed to be about. But I'm sure
that there is meaning behind it none the less. I would imagine ten years from
today looking back at this image and knowing with great certainty what I was
trying to tell myself. I only hope the message isn't too personal!

My entry in the Mystery competition was an image inspired by the Surrealists. I
was shocked when just days after I submitted my image I learned that the topic
of this round was Surrealism! I was delighted! I figured that I had done all my
research. I had learned from my mistakes. Now I was free to simply make art.
But it was not as simple as I had hoped. It was hard to escape the gravity of
the prior image. I was being pulled back into making the same image all over
again. I needed to find a fresh idea. For the first month I did nothing but
sketch out ideas. I was beginning to loose hope when a crying flower popped up
in one of my sketches. The idea that a flower could cry (thus being
self-watering) was to good to pass up. There stood an emotion filled plant in a
barren world. It's eye raised to the heavens, it's roots stretched for
freedom.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Modeling
All of the models in this image were created within 3D Studio Max. Roots and
stems are lofts as well as the twisty table legs. Lofts in Max allow some very
handy options. You can scale the shape along the path, which I used to taper
the plant stem. You can also use multiple shapes within one loft. That was very
helpful for giving the main flower stem "fluting" at the base then making it
smoother at the top. Also there are controls for texture mapping so no matter
how twisty your loft is your texture map can follow. If you look at the table
legs you'll see that they twist in the middle of the leg. That too is managed
with Max's lofting controls.

Most other modeling was done by tweaking control points of meshes. I usually
start with a very simple mesh and apply a "Mesh Smooth" modifier. This
subdivides the original mesh and smoothes the result. This often proves to be a
simple way to model organic shapes because it is much easier to work with less
vertices. However it is often necessary to return to the original structure to
make revisions based on the results of the Mesh Smooth, or to further modify
the end result of the Mesh Smooth. Max handles this very nicely.

I found numerous sites with stop-motion photos of water and milk. These photos
were very interesting as well as informative. These served as reference for the
tears in my image. I took some liberties with physics, for example the surface
tension in a drop of water causes it to maintain a spherical shape rather than
tear drop when falling trough air. However a tear drop shape suggests motion
better and is what people imagine a drop of falling water to look like. Since
we are dealing with Surrealism these violations seem trivial.

For the "crown" splashes I started with one spike (including a wedge slice of
the center "bowl". When I had that exactly right and with a minimum of faces, I
made nine copies of it rotating each 36 degrees and joined the copies into a
completed crown shape. Each crown is part of a puddle of water. That puddle
needs very little geometry - compared to the crown. So I needed to simplify the
mesh at the bottom of the crown to avoid spreading the same mesh density over
the entire puddle. This is a slow manual process of joining segments of the
mesh together while maintaining each element in the mesh as a four-sided
surface. Also each angle must be less than 180 degrees or odd wrinkles
develop.

The tear splash on the table (a rebound after a drop has hit the surface) was a
simple lathe. 

All of the dripping tears started as spheres. The top half of the spheres
modified to look drippy. The most challenging drip was the one coming directly
from the eye. The film of water over the eye puddles up a bit at the bottom
eyelid. Then at one point it overflows the eyelid and runs down over the flower
petal. The shape of this trail of water had to follow the contour of the flower
very closely. There is no easy way to do this. And so a lot of time was spent
zoomed in to tweak then zoomed out to test render. Unfortunately all this
effort is nearly invisible!

Textures
Most of the textures are combinations of bit maps made in PhotoShop and
procedural maps. The ground, dirt in the pot, and sky are procedural with may
layers each. The plant stem is covered with a bitmap for both the color and
bump (or normal map). I used Dark Tree's Simbiont plug-in for the texture of
the iris and rusty metal table (it's free at http://www.darksim.com/ and there
are versions for a variety of applications - unfortunately not in POV-ray).

