EMAIL: flipturn2001@aol.com
NAME: Ryan Pearl
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Gone...
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.lesd.org
RENDERER USED: Bryce 5
TOOLS USED: PhotoImpact to resize the image to a suitable size and add watermark, Poser 4
RENDER TIME: 1h 12m 20s
HARDWARE USED: 2.4ghz P4

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
Fairly minimal concept; I tried to come up with something --- at first a rotting orange, then waves crushing a city.
I sat down and thought about decay, and what I envisioned was a crumbling, old temple. 

A base quote (because I like quotes): 

"Because...a god lived here. A powerful god. Thousands worshipped it. I can feel it. You know? It comes out of the walls. A Great God. Mighty were his dominions and magnificent was his word. Armies went forth in his name and conquered and slew. That kind of thing. And no one, not you, not me, no one, even knows who the god was or his name or what he looked like. Lions drink in the holy places and centipedes crawl beneath the altar. Now do you understand?"

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

All native Brycean objects, except for the skeleton which was created in Poser 4. Textures are mostly mine, but the bricks are modified from one found at http://www.3dcommune.com. Sky is a heavy modification of one of the default skies, with extra lighting added.

The pillars are boolean objects with custom textures, and all the cracks you see in the image --- in the base of the temple and in the pillars, are created with negative booleans. I wanted to add a different texture but couldn't figure out how to tweak it properly to add bumps to the areas that were chopped off.

Another thing I intended to do was make temples on the distance, but the haze from the sky screwed that up. Normally I'd paint them in later but not for this competition so the image is not exactly the one I want, but I still believe the effect is.