TITLE: First (and Last) Encounter
NAME: Sammy Fischer
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: sammy@cube.net
WEBPAGE: http://home.talkcity.com/GalleryDr/schnoet
TOPIC: First Encounter
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sf_bony.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema4D XL 4.25

TOOLS USED: 
    Organica, Corel Photopaint

RENDER TIME: 
    2'19"

HARDWARE USED: 
    self assembled PII-333, 256Mb


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

        Sometime, the First Encounter may also be the Last. Especially when you
meet with relics of long forgotten civilizations ...
         

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

        My first idea was to do a cheesy 'Meeting of the Third Kind' picture, in
which humans were the visitors.
        
        I designed the plants and then Bony (he got this name because he was
built especially to be in conjunction with C4D's Bones ... nothing
biological!;) using Organica. Took like 1 1/2 hour for Bony, and 20 Minutes for
the plants. 
        I then experienced with CineHaar (C4D Hair plugin), and the resulting
Bonies were very cute, but weren't what I had in mind. Still .. you may see
them in other pictures. I added the bones in C4D (like, 1 hour of work), and
began to experience with positions.
        
        To help me out figuring how it would look in a real scene, I added the
sandy ground, the environmental fog and the sun (just to keep on telling how
much time everything took : 11.5 sec;) ... and this was the point where I knew
how everything should look like, and that my first idea was not going to see
the light of day (yet).
        
        The bomb took 1 hour to build and map in C4d (most of which was taken by
placing the different maps). It's just a morph object and the fins are
transformed pyramids. The USAF and SAC Logos, and also the Radiation Warning
Signs were taken from the Corel Draw Cliparts.
        I then made 30 copies of the plant, and randomized the position, heading
and size.
        
        Next came the footsteps (additiv bump map on the ground. Beautifully
shows how C4D decreases the bump height proportianl to the distance from the
camera), and the sand under the bomb (small plane underneath the ground with a
displacement map).

        Everything looked very nice, but there was a feeling that something was
missing. This is how the ruins came about. *THEY* did take longer than planned.
I first build a thick wall and, using the duplicate funtion, I made an array of
longish quads. These were then substracted from the wall. I then copied the
walls so that I had a kind of topless tower with holes as windows. 

        Last thing I did in C4D was to used a polygonal ball which was randomly
deformed and to substract parts of the tower.
        
        Rendering options were : full Reflections, only straight transparency,
Anti-Alias only on vertices with 3x3 oversampling, Hard and Soft shadows.

        After rendering the image, I added my logo in the right end bottom
corner and decreased the JPG Quality using CorelDraw, as the original JPG was
330Kb big.