TITLE: Beyond
NAME: John Brown
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: jbrown@ananzi.co.za
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Dreaming
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: beyond.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3dsmax4

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro and three max plugins (Finalrender, SimCloth and
PaintDeform)

RENDER TIME: 
    approx. 1 hour 20 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    AMD Duron 800MHz


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


A surreal and abstract dreamscape, a dream world. A bare tree growing out of a
silver disc is surrounded by a spiral staircase of stone. Strips of blue cloth
hang over the staircase, separating the bleakness inside from the vibrant
colours outside. A window, above a floating chessboard, looks out to the dunes
and a red cloth hanging, suspended, in the air. And in the background, another
window, looking further away...


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I used the freeware PaintDeform plugin to create the sand dunes as the plugin
allows you to paint deformations (similar to Maya Artisan) onto models. I
created the stairs and used SimCloth (another freeware plugin) and manual
editing to create the blue and red cloths in the scene. I applied a ripple
modifier to the cylinder (under the tree) and edited it so that it would look
like the cylinder is becoming the tree. The tree is an old model that I had. I
used modified Max textures and procedural textures in the scene. The texture of
the tree was desatured to create a greyscale look on that part of the image. A
volume light effect was added to the light shining on the tree from above.
Finalrender was used for GI rendering and I added a small glow using Max Video
Post. I decreased the brightness and increased the contrast of the final image
in PSP.

