TITLE: Tree of Life
NAME: W. Szab Pter
COUNTRY: Romania
EMAIL: szabocom@zappmobile.ro
TOPIC: Surrealism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: tol.jpg
ZIPFILE: tol.zip
RENDERER USED: 

    Maxon Advanced Render
    

TOOLS USED: 

    Maxon Cinema 4D R8 v8.100, Ozone 2, Photoshop 7.0
    

RENDER TIME: 

    around 4 hrs (3:49:17)
    

HARDWARE USED: 

    P4 2.5 GHz, 1GB RAM
    

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
        Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 
        You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
        A heap of broken images..."
        (Thomas Stearns Eliot)
    I love Eliot's Waste Land, but in this image I wanted to show my own waste
land "vision". It's a landscape without life, except the tree in the center.
The earth is polluted; it's full with oil spots and gaps. I wanted to create
the surface of the dieing Earth. In the image you can find the source of this
sickness: The factory, the coal plant and the car. They represent a few of the
main sources of the global pollution. The structures and the car seem to be
forgotten there. The surfaces are rusty and corroded. Whit this I wanted to
express that if the living world dies sooner or later the machinery and all of
the human creations follows it.  
    In the center there is a Celtic cross and a tree. The cross represents
self-sacrifice. The tree (a weeping willow.), here the Tree of Life is about to
die. The leaves are autumn colored, and the branches show the sorrow and the
pain of the nature. The leaves are luminous, with this I wanted to express the
holiness of the life, of the nature. I hope there will be a few who understands
my message to the humankind. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

    This is my first entry to IRTC, and I like the idea of a "description of how
this image was created". I think it's a good way to learn and teach. (Or learn
to teach.)    
    I used Photoshop to make the two Celtic style textures. One for the cross
(cel_1.tif), and one for my name plate in the lower right corner (cel_2.tif).
You can find them in the tol.zip file, in the cel_tex directory. 
    Then I reduced the fill for layers in cel_1 to 0%, and added black stroke.
Then I was finished with Photoshop. After that I only used it to resize and
recompress (.jpg) my final image. 
    In Cinema4D using the before mentioned contour it was easy to make the
spline for the cross. I used Bezier Spline parts, joined them, and put them in
an extrude nurbs object. See the spline.tif in the dohtiwc folder of the
included zip file. The other "tutorial" images are in that folder too. If you
are interested check them.) 
    The texture color contains only rust. The cel_1.tif map was applied to the
bump map, with a trick. I combined it with a rust pattern using bhodiNUT
Fusion. (See: t_1.jpg) I like this technique, and I used in many parts of the
picture.
    The surface (landscape) is made using three Fractal objects. I used a two
layered texture. The lower layer cowers all; the upper has a 3D noise alpha
map, and makes the oil spots. In the "mountain" what contains the tree and the
cross the lower map has small light brown spots. Those are the fallen leaves.
    The factory in the background is not totally my creation. I used some
royalty free 3D models made by Dosch Design, but I added a few and removed many
details. The textures are mine totally. They were made using similar methods.
It would be waste of disk space to write down all of them. (And example is in
t_2.jpg. It's the roof texture's color for the main building.)
    The power plant is made using a cylinder primitive. It was put in a hyper
nurbs object, and the majority of the shaping was using weight modifications
and edge moving. Then I made two instances of the finished shape. I made them
editable, and edited every instance a little, and added separate textures. (In
real world there are a little chance to find tree absolute identical objects.)
And added some small horizontal cylinders. They are the remaining of the
fencing.  
    The car is a royalty free Dosch Design model, but removed more then 50%-of
the detail to increase render speed. I made new material. The most difficult
was the car window. It "broken window" effect is made without altering the
polygons of the window. It's an alpha map, generated from a 2D noise using
bhodiNUT Fusion. (See: broken_w.jpg). 
    My name plate is a STOP sign. It has two layers of texture, and the top
layer contains the cel_2.tif. (See: t_3.jpg)
    The last thing to model was the weeping willow. To model the root (_g1), the
body (_g2), and the branches (_g3) I used hyper nurbs. It's one of the most
powerful modeling tools in C4D. The leaves are used with "cut-out" technique
using alpha map. And I added luminance to them to achieve the "sanctity of the
life" effect. (See tree.jpg for modeling and lumen.jpg for the luminance
technique.)
    I used 3 light sources. The "sun" and the ambient light got Ozone
Sun/Ambient Light Tag. I used Ozone 2 plugin made by e-on software to achieve
the "unrealistic" looking sky and lights. I started from a pre-made atmosphere,
and modified it until I was pleased with the result. (If you are interested I
used two layers of 3d clouds, and a small amount of grayish fog to cover
everything.)
    The rendering_ I used geometry antialiasing with still image filter to
increase the speed. I used radiosity with stochastic mode, and that shows in
the final image I think. Maxon's Advanced Render did a great job. (I included
in the zip file the 1280*1024 tol.tif.)


