TITLE: High Voltage
NAME: Michael Scholz
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de
TOPIC: The Laboratory
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: voltage.jpg
ZIPFILE: voltage.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    3DStudioMax3.1

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop5.5 for texture preparation and jpg-file

RENDER TIME: 
    4 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual PII400, 256MB Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A science fiction laboratory of enormous proportion, some
mysterious experiment which involves very high voltage is
in progress. What is this all about? I really don't know.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I wished to make a sf-lab with lots of special fx and not
a chemistry lab. I remembered designs from comicbooks and
early sci-fi movies and tried to achieve a feel of those.

Modeling

Because I had only a day to finish this project (too much 
other stuff kept me busy all the time), I couldn't afford
to do much complicated modeling and needed to keep every-
thing quite simple. Most things are made from cylindrical
objects, and everything is mirrored and cloned to fill up
the scene within a huge sphere. The sparks in the central
area are renderable splines with a noisemodifier applied,
that little person is just an extruded spline silhouette.

Texturing

See the zip-file for the bump maps I made. Actually there
aren't many texture maps involved at all except for bump.

Lighting

There are 14 omnis in the scene, some redish, or blueish,
one is green. All are attenuated so they don't affect all
of the scene. And there are three glow and flare effects,
one behind the figure, one with the sparks and another on
the rings. It was fun playing around with the parameters,
and I learned stuff I didn't know before. Keep playing :)