TITLE: Medusa's Lair
NAME: Brian White
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: white@rational.com
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: medusa.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Bryce 4

TOOLS USED: 
    Bryce 4, Poser 4, Plant Studio, Tree Druid

RENDER TIME: 
    1hr 56min

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III (128Mb RAM)

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

  
My initial efforts on this topic were discarded once I hit upon this question: 
"What happened to the lair of the Medusa after she was killed?"  I started
thinking about things like, did she arrange her stone victims in a way that
pleased her or did she leave them where they stood?  The scene shows the
entrance to her mountain lair in the early morning with the sun rising and a
misty fog still clinging to the land.  The figures are frozen in their last
acts of bravery or fear.  A snake shows that evil still lurks amoungst the
decay awaiting a chance to return.  
 

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I was looking to produce an image that met three criteria: photorealism,
creative interpertion of the topic, and
one that invoked an emotional response.  You'll have to tell me whether I
succeeded.

The Figures...
This was my first use of Poser and I enjoyed creating the figures.  Each figure
was posed using the default nude man as its basis, exported to DXF format, and
imported into Bryce for placement.  The closest figure is only a bust.  The
third figure in the background had multiple parts removed to simulate a statue
falling apart.  All texturing for the entire image is done using procedural
textures which I find more satisfying to use than bitmaps from scanned images.

The Vines...
The vines on the first and second figure were created using a technique I
learned from an article by William Munns in Issue #38 of 3DArtist.  Briefly,
Bryce offers a render mode called altitude where the highest parts of a scene
are rendered in white, lowest in black, and grey scale in between.  By laying
an object down flat and rendering from the top, you can create a gray scale
bitmap that can be used as a terrian map (height field).  Using Bryces terrain
editor, you then hand draw the vines onto the terrian created from this bitmap.
 Then by repositioning the vines terrain object over the actual figure object
it gives the appearance of the vines wrapping around the figure.  The leaves
for the vines up close were created in Plant Studio, imported into Bryce for
duplication, resizing and texturing.  I enjoyed adding the spots to the vine
leaves to given them a sickly feel.

The Snake...
The snake head is from Poser.  The body is a torus object cut with a negative
cube all created in Bryce.  The texture was created using Bryce's deep texture
editor.  The bump map I used for the scales was found on the web somewhere I
can't remember. 

The Tree...
The tree was created with Tree Druid.  The folliage is made up of two Bryce
terrain objects angled toward the camera along with a procedural texture that
has quite a bit of transparency.    In other words, you couldn't animate this
scene.  The folliage looks right only from the camera view.  The bark texture
is also prodedural created in Bryce.  The nice look of this texture on the
trunk is pure luck!  Another terrain was created around the tree base to give
it a mossy look.

Other details:
The background is a giant terrain.  It is as if you were looking at a hollow
mountain from the bottom.  The idea was to create a cave entrance, but no mater
how I sized it this didn't quite happen.  The mist / fog are two giant spheres
with a stock cloud texture applied.  A mild amount of haze was used to increase
the sense of depth.


     

