EMAIL: john_r_jones@hotmail.com
NAME: John Jones
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Humanity
COUNTRY: England
WEBPAGE: N/A
RENDERER USED: Bryce 5
TOOLS USED: Bryce 5, Poser 5, Paint shop Pro 7
RENDER TIME: 14 min 6 sec
HARDWARE USED: AMD Athlon 2600 1Gb Ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
An alley way which houses the garbage collection point for many people, but 
not just that, it is also the waste point of our own humanity.  We acquire 
and we consume and we waste.  Turning earth into a vast dumping ground, 
everything we buy comes in packaging in some form or another we take out the 
product and discard the packing.  We all do this at least 5 times a day we 
rarely recycle and much of our waste is dumped into a land fill of some 
kind.  As this planet becomes a ball of waste it looks like we have been 
thrown out with the rest of the crap and there sits earth leaking it's 
oceans spill over the cold concrete, Earth drying up in the oppressive heat 
and growing mouldy over time as it lays in the waste of our own creation.  A 
short distance away, the moon rolling in a trash can lid filled with putrid 
water as we set sights on another rock to waste. At the base of one of these 
other bins does there await our next victim of our disease like nature to 
strip a planet of all it's natural resources and replace them with our 
unwanted waste which we will sweep under the surface much like that of a rug 
to hide what we do not want to see...

The whole image is a metaphor, I know earth is bigger then a trash can.

Ok so it is a little bit of tree hugging hippy stuff, but hopefully a 
powerful message is conveyed in the image.  But if not, it is nice and 
original... (I hope)

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

There is a little bit of Jpeg compression going on but only to maintain the 
aspect ratio or 800x600 and stay under 250kb rule.  I cannot notice any Jpeg 
pixelation in the image though as it still seems to be pretty clean.

started with a floor, Bryce's own pitted concrete texture with a lowish 
bump, but scaled up drastically to attempting to make it realistic looking, 
perhaps this could have been ramped up a bit more?  Answers on a post card.

Then created the Walls in the back ground now the texture is an actual wall 
taken with a Digi Cam for those who are interested (Sony DSC F505) scaled 
and applied to world cubic to ensure the scale remained the same regardless 
of the area covered or angle of the object I think it came out quite well, 
although it doesn't tile brilliantly, if I had spent a little more time on 
it I am sure I could have removed the seems but they are not too noticeable 
and after starting at it for a while in PSP7 trying to make it tile-able I 
was starting to suffer from brick blindness...

Added 2 lattices to the base of the wall, one low and reasonable flat to 
simulate a bit of dirt and muck the other spiked a fair bit to give the 
impression of grass and weeds growing up from the mud.

After the basic layout created the bin from a very long cone with the bottom 
cut of and hollowed out using same 2 objects as a negative boolean, handles 
are formed from basic shapes rounded cubes and flattened spheres for the 
bolts the rounded edge of the bin and same for the rounded edges of lid 
appear a little angular as these where made from Cylinders on edge 
duplicated around the centre point as Bryce is slightly limited when it 
comes to rounded edges, you have to do it in this manner.  So while trying 
to keep the appearance of rounded edges but not sacrificing too much to the 
polygon count I did get this hexagonal appearance but I can live with it.  
The texture however I found on the web and it is a great texture and hides 
the not so circular appearance to the bins edges quite well I feel.  Added a 
little more bump to the bump map and I was happy to continue.

the trash in the bins well on some bins I have placed a plastic liner which 
is simply an inverted terrain lattice with rounded edges and applied a shiny 
black texture nothing fancy on that and I was very happy with the results of 
it though.  Boxes are just cubes with a cardboard boxy colour with a slight 
bump to appear moisture swollen and dirty cans are simply cylinders with 
negative torus Booleans at either end it is a bud label found on the web but 
was completed to make the beer can label full just but a bit of cut and past 
and typing in the words from the can, same you can't see the detail from the 
camera angle...  Probably just as well as Bud might complain it was actually 
legible.  The bottles are from a previous scene created the "Mystery" 
competition since I already modelled the bottle didn't feel like doing it 
again as I had enough trouble the first time, a few cylinders and a cone 
make up the bottle.  The Broken bottle is the same thing but used a spiky 
landscape negative Boolean to make it appear broken, the broken glass is 
just another landscape lattice with only the highest parts on display with 
the same glass texture.

That about covers everything else.  Earth is 3 spheres, 1st is textured with 
a planet earth map found on a google search for images not very hi res but 
from this size and distance you really can't tell...  I altered the map by 
painting a grey bumpy looking texture over the base of earth which you can 
just see, this is to make up the mould growing up wards from the damp 
rotting rubbish it sits on, and this is also lightly reflective for the 
authenticity of water!  Then the 2nd is the cloud map, a little artistic 
license with a spray can in PSP7 looked real enough... the 3rd is very 
subtle but really brought the realism when testing the earth in a neutral 
black background is a light sensitive fuzzy white which gives the atmosphere 
glow earth has when the side is in darkness.

The Moon is well... the moon, one sphere and one texture the texture is also 
a moon picture found on google.

there are a few puddles knocking about the scene which are very flattened 
landscape lattices to give that puddle shape the ones to represent the 
oceans soaking into the concrete are much lighter and more transparent to 
imply it is soaked into the concrete rather then forming a puddle.

in the darkest part of the image I have a bit of light volumetric haze his 
is purely to give the impression of the lines of detail as I did not want a 
solid dark spot with no detail at all you can just make out the curves of 
the trash cans in the back which I feel adds a bit more ambience.

So I think I have rambled on enough about that..

Hope you enjoyed looking at the image and reading this "gumpf" as I did 
creating it.

P.S thanks to all those who commented in "Mystery" much appreciated and very 
constructive...