TITLE: Leaving Siwah
NAME: Steve Bennett
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: engsteve11@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: KarmaStorm ?
TOPIC: Mystery
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: siwah19f.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Cinema 4D

TOOLS USED: 
    Cinema 4D; PhotoShop; Picture Publisher; Poser4; ThumbsPlus, &
PovRay 3.0e

RENDER TIME: 
    1 hour 24 minutes @1280x960 (without area light)
             4 hours 38 minutes for the top section (/w area light)


HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz /w 512 ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Alexander the Great leaves Siwah after consulting the oracle of Zeus-Ammon
there. What he really learned there about his own destiny is one of the
greatest mysteries of all time, but there is little doubt concerning his
subsequent conquests in the East. I believe this priestess has had an insight
of her own following his departure, but I've no idea exactly what that might
have been.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I've never entered this contest before but this subject caught my eye so I
though I would have a whack at it. 

This was rendered at a larger size originally and scaled to a more modest size
which gave me better results than rendering at my target 1024x768. The top
architrave is the only area receiving an area shadow so it was rendered
separately as the top 15% of the image required 90% of the render time.

We have our usual Poser suspects which I made a lot of use of. These were
imported into C4D as .obj files, then each polygon object was hand textured
which isn't very hard, since I knew these figures would be relatively obscured
by shadow and lurid lighting so I didn't spend a lot of time on each eyelash
etc. The Anubis statues were just a headless default man with a wolf's head
surgically stuck onto his neck. I did some modification to the meshes so they
wouldn't look so wolf-like and made the ears long and pointy, but to me they
still have the 'frightened-dog' look you see in cartoons. Their 'skirts' are
truncated cones, the breastplates and pectorals are their own skin sections
expanded a bit and re-textured.

You will recognize the other building blocks of such a common scene, although
the columns are actually lathe objects. I traced a spline from a photo of an
egyptian column in Corel so it should be fairly accurate other than the scale
which I am aware is much smaller than life. But I wanted a more intimate, even
claustrophic setting for this little scenario. The floor is a texture T_Stone28
I think from POV. There are 44 bitmaps used for various textures which I either
created or gleaned from exhaustive searches. Notable although not very visible,
are the textures for the wings on the scarab which were painted right on the
object using BodyPaint. Most of the hieroglyphs were typeset in Corel. The
bulls are an image map with a bump map I sculpted as a greyscale in PhotoShop.
As for the other textures I had good luck by and large inverting the image map
for a texture, converting to greyscale and using that as my bump map.

That center piece is just a bit of pectoral I laboriously modeled bit by bit
with extrude objects. This is the sort of thing I would normally have made as a
heightfield object, which I'm a pretty fair hand at, in PhotoShop. Although
Cinema4D does have a mechanism for utilizing greyscale reliefs, it's clumsy
compared to POV and really starts to bog your system the finer you subdivide
it. You can add smoothing tags but it just doesn't do the job, and as this is
my first serious effort with a modeler I wanted to see how I would approach it
with polygons. I was going to laboriously model the central green scarab but I
became so disgusted with my lack of skill that I just used spheres in the end.
Once I realized how dark and tiny the scarab pectoral would be I just faked it.
You can't see the lovely Eye of Ra pectoral on the priestess either, although I
spent about a day on it alone. So I incorporated it into my signature and stuck
it in the lower right corner of the image.

Last but not least are the lights. I spent at least half of my time on this
project working on light placement and characteristics. There are about a dozen
spots and many of them are volumetric. I put lights wherever I wanted them and
wasn't concerned if there was no particular reason for a light to be in a
certain place. If I wanted to accentuated something somewhere it got a light.
But I bent a lot of rules in the entire image anyway, obeying my tastes as
opposed to obeying some 'reality' that doesn't exist anyway.

I have worked on this for several weeks pretty much starting from scratch
concerning my knowledge of C4D. There isn't anything really fancy here just
some blocks, cones and planes, with a lathe object here and there. I've never
been able to afford a modeler of any kind and have always used POV for my
stuff, but I don't think I could have created this at the keyboard quite
honestly I'm not that good.
 
I'd like to thank Maisoun for letting me use her system with all it's resources,
and my fiance' Suryakala for letting me devote myself to this project (to the
exclusion of all else) for the last several weeks.























