TITLE: Hopper
NAME: Michael Scholz
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de
TOPIC: Ruins
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: hopper.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3DStudioMax2.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop5.5 for copyright text and jpg-file

RENDER TIME: 
    12 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual PII400, 256MB Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


This image was inspired by the paintings of famous american artist
Mr. Edward Hopper, who was a genius at capturing light and spirit.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Texturing

To make things old and dirty I used splatter, noise and bump maps.
The sky is a colourful gradient map which uses some noise as well.
I've learned an important lesson: test-render your textures with a
full scale image. The house looked much more ruined in small tests
and turned out rather clean in the final image. Well, next time...


Modelling

The cornfield might be of interest: it is made of about 700 planes
which are opacity mapped with a simple grassblade texture and then
scattered about. The train in the background is an extruded spline
shape with a particle system for the smoke. The background blur is
done with the renderers focal-loss thingy to add some image depth.