TITLE: Piano Fish
NAME: Jason Knight
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: jsgknight@yahoo.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.renderosity.com/homepage.ez?Who=jsgknight
TOPIC: Fire and Ice
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: pianofis.jpg
ZIPFILE: pianofis.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema 4D

TOOLS USED: 
    My demented mind.

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hr

HARDWARE USED: 
    Anything and everything I could hook to my computer to make it
run faster.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I have included full size version of the image in the zip file. I realize this
image may be a stretch as far as the Fire & Ice topic goes, but I assure you
that when I started out my intentions were much more focused. Hopefully the
judges wont be to brutal after reading this. My original plan was to make an
ice fish jumping out of a bowl of flaming hot lava, but when I rendered it, I
thought it looked pathetic. Then (this is when I got way off track) I shifted
focus and decided to make the fins into piano keys and the flaming droplets of
lava into music notes. With a few good suggestions from my friends I decided to
model some jets and pipes. He looked a bit lonely, so I decided to model a
passenger. Modeling the dragon took the longest, he is made of metaballs. With
the dragon came the need for a saddle, harness and a seatbelt. In keeping with
my own piano theme (way off track, now) I decided to model a hat shaped like a
piano hammer. In the end I ran out of time and was so far off topic that I
considered scratching the whole project. I found some spare time to add the
fire and smoke 3 hours before the deadline and unfortunately neither turned out
how I imagined. Anyway, I had fun making the little fellows and hopefully
someone will enjoy them.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

I also included a copy my Cinema 4D(v9) file in the zip file. I would ask that
my models not be reused in any way, but please feel free to learn from my file.
The water droplets/music notes are made using splines and metaballs. The fish
was originally from PlanIt3D but required a major overhaul. The fins/piano keys
are box modeled and then deformers were added to shape them. Unfortunately they
don_t look very much like ice, but they were supposed to fulfill the "Ice"
requirement for the topic. The jet pipe was made using the QuickPipe plugin and
several deformers. The other pipes, harness, seatbelt, hat straps and parts of
the saddle were also made using the same plugin. The dragon was modeled using
splines and metaballs; this took a while to get him to look right. The piano
hammer/hat is an extrude nurbs object with some hair added using the
HairDepartment plugin. The flames were created using omni lights with visible
light turned on and noise added. They are my feeble attempt at fulfilling the
"fire" requirement. The smoke was a quick last minute add-on and is made with
relief objects. All image textures are made in Corel Photo-Paint, Adobe
PhotoShop CS and Macromedia Flash MX. The only postwork is the copyright and
signature. Thanks for looking and voting, good luck to all the entries.

