TITLE: The Mad Scientist.

NAME: Tim Cuthbertson
COUNTRY: Australia

EMAIL: tim_cutho@smileyface.com
WEBPAGE: www.tim3d.com

TOPIC: Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: mad_lab.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3d studio max v3.1 (student version)


TOOLS USED: 
    Imagine It! (jpeg conversion)

CREATION TIME: I actually used all of the time availiable for this project. I
started soon after it was announced, and finished it a few days before the
entries closed.
Unfortunately because of school, I could mostly only work on it during weekends,
and even then only about half of them, because I am heavily involved in
scouts.


RENDER TIME: 
    I'm not sure. It took ages to do all of the reflection and
refraction maps because of all the glass I used in the scene.


HARDWARE USED: 
    A pentium III 600mhz I think (it's my dad's).




IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    A mad scientist has left his table for a moment or two. . .
But everything has gone wrong!!!
The blue formula he was slowly heating has suddenly began to glow and overflow,
the antigravity test tube he had made using a pink liquid has suddenly lost
it's antigravity, and the green liquid in the flask has had a chemical reaction
and now glowing dropplets are shooting from it.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

All models and textures (except for the photo) were created completely by me for
this project.
This is in the order that I made everything:

The glass texture was used for about half the models in this scene. It is almost
completely transparent, and uses a thin wall refaction to make it distort as if
it were real glass.

The test tubes were just cylinders, half-spheres, and toruses all joined
together.

The holder was 2 boxes and 2 cylinders joined together, and then I used the test
tubes to extract holes in it.

The bunsen burner is a lathe at the base, and then some cylinders with a few
more cylinders cut out of them for the airholes.

The tripod is 3 cylinders and a squashed torus.

The gauze mat is a plane that is turned to be a wireframe.

The shattered test tube is a test tube model with a Particle array attached to
it.

The other glass equipment are also lathes, and the liquid inside them is just a
scaled down         version of them, changed a bit so the liquid has a flat
top.

The bubbles in them are arrays of completely ambient white spheres.

The stuff shooting out of the green liquid is a superspray object.

All of the glowing areas are different lens effects within 3ds max.

The picture is an image map of a photo I found on the internet, and then a
cut-out box for the         frame.

Finally, the flame is half of a sphere gizmo with a tendril combustion effect
applied inside it.

I also placed lights at each of the points where the glow is, so that it gives
the scene a more coloured, interesting look.



Please visit my website at www.tim3d.com for more stills and even better
animaions.