EMAIL: intertek@one.net
NAME: Michael Hunter
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Puddle
COUNTRY: USA
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net 
RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max Version 5.1
TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps, resizing image), Simbiont plug-in (http://www.darksim.com/)
RENDER TIME: 5 Hours 23 Minutes @ 1600x1200
HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 261 MB RAM, Umax Astra 610S scanner (very old)


BIRTH OF AN IDEA:
The image I was working on just didn't wow me. It was a good idea but it seemed labored and gray and to be honest... it bored me. 

I went for a walk in the park with my five-year-old son Daniel. It was a beautiful fall day. The trees where yellow, orange and red. My son was picking up leaves and showing the best ones to me. I suddenly realized that all this beauty was actually decay! This image came to mind. I had to do it. But it was just two weeks before the deadline and I had already spent one and a half months working on the other image! Daniel was a great help collecting leaves for reference (I was caring my nine-month old daughter and it was difficult to pick things up off of the ground). Daniel was very excited about helping Daddy make a picture! We collected a plastic bag full of leaves (which are at this moment spread all over my desk). If "decay" was the November-December topic I doubt I would have made the connection to fall leaves.

As with so many things, I owe my son thanks for showing me the beauty and wonder of the world through the eyes of a five-year-old.


IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
I think we all looked at this topic and visualized a gray shadow world. Like that shown in the movie "Blade Runner". Even though there are so many images on this topic, there's something endlessly festinating about aged and worn materials. In part because the history of the objects become visible - written on and into their surfaces. Though that is interesting, I wanted to approach the topic from a different direction. Decay can so easily be monochromatic and depressing (especially when there are a hundred such images shown together, as is the case now). I wanted to say something positive on the topic and use some color. When I (with the help of my son) discovered the colorful leaves it was the solution I was looking for.

There were other aspects of this idea that excited me. Most all images (using any medium) point the camera straight ahead. Turning the camera to the ground seemed dramatically unusual. Not only was it an odd direction to look but the "landscape" is nearly flat. From the highest point on the dragonfly's wing to the deepest point in the puddle the entire foreground, middle ground, background is compressed into a space just inches deep. Instead of a grand space with towering objects I give you a leaf and a bug on a stick. But I hope it makes you smile and see the splendor of seemingly humble objects.

I felt that it was important to suggest that there is a world around this view. I show objects running off of the edge of the image - like the stick, weeds, stones that are half in the picture. The rest of these objects are outside the frame suggesting that there is more to this world. The sunlight and reflections suggests that if you were to look up you would see the sun and trees. The ripples in the water suggest that there is a breeze (something that wouldn't exist without a world). In earlier versions I had cast shadows running into the image from trees outside the frame (later these were removed for compositional reasons). All these small clues I hope give you the sense that this is a close-up piece of an entire world.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

Preliminary Work:
The image I had in my mind was very clear to me. I did no preliminary drawings nor did I search for other related images for visual advice (other than my bag of leaves). I was uncharacteristically certain about the elements in the picture, the composition, lighting the whole thing was in my head. It was just a matter of making the rendering match.

Leaves:
I scanned many leaves and picked out the one that had the right color, shape, speckles, etc. This worked as a diffuse color map and a guide for creating the shape of the leaf. I also used the same map as a bump map. After meshing the outline of the leaf I pushed and pulled the vertices to make the leaf non-flat.

Rocks:
I didn't want any two rocks to be the same. That is a really hard thing to do when you have hundreds of them! I started with a sphere. I deleted the bottom surfaces. Then made many (maybe 35 or so) slightly altered versions of that sphere. They were then arranged on top of a large rectangular patch (for the mud between the rocks). I duplicated the original set several times being careful to avoid any signs of repetition. Most of the duplicates were also rotated. When that was done I created three rock materials (textures) and three materials that were halfway blends between those (textures A, B, C and (A+B), (A+C), (B+C)). This gave me a set of six similar but different rock textures. These textures were applied to the rocks randomly. Using this method two rocks might have the same shape but have different textures hiding the repetition. As far as I can tell, I could not find any repetitions at all so I'm happy.

Making the hole in the ground was not as hard as you might imagine. I "attached" the individual rocks and the mesh under it, which then counts these things as sub-elements of one larger structure. Since there are many vertices in the rocks and the mesh under them it was easy to grab big handfuls of vertices and pull them down then repeat the process with smaller selections closer to the center. 3D Studio Max has a selection option called "Soft-Select" which allows transitions applied to faces or vertices to affect surrounding non-selected vertices with a variable falloff. The end result is as you see a collection of rocks that follow the contour of an uneven surface.

Water:
Probably the bulk of the time I spent on the image was devoted to making the water. It seems that very small changes in one of many attributes can make dramatic changes in the final rendering. I used a layered fog, with a dark greenish gray color, to suggest volume in the water rather than just a colored water surface. The fog starts at the surface of the water and ends just below the bottom the puddle. The surface is medium blue-gray color but is completely transparent. It's color further tints the rocks in the water. The ripples are a product of a procedural water bump map and several "space warps". A space warp distorts the coordinate system for selected objects. Unlike applying a normal map to a POV-ray camera, space warps only affect the location of vertices - edges connecting the vertices remain straight. This means that the polygon count of the water's surface has to be very high to produce smooth surface. The surface reflects a sketch I made of tree limbs with red and yellow leaves and blue sky. The specular highlight level is set to a whopping 537 (100 is usually enough to make something look shinny). This exaggerated value helped to produce the blinding glint of sun off the surface of the water.

Other Objects:
The weeds are lofted shapes with a two sided material (a material that can be seen on both the outside and inside surfaces). I made a dozen or so different blades then rotated them and grouped them differently to suggest that they were all different. The big trick was to get them growing out of the mud between the rocks (which I was only partially successful). This was a hard task because the amount of polygons in the ground hid anything that was on top of it. In essence I could either see the weeds or see the rocks but not both at the same time.

The stick started out as several of cylinders. The bark on the stick is extruded away from the central axis of the cylinder. The broken end was simply pulling and pushing the vertices at the end of the cylinder. I was shocked to see that such a simple thing worked. I was anticipating the need for much more effort to make the broken wood.

The dragonfly is a simple collection of spheres - a bit squashed. Extruding a circle of faces from the rear end of the sphere that makes his body made the tail. His tail was given budges at regular intervals to make it look segmented. A "bend" modifier was applied though from this angle it is hard to see. The wings use a transparency map. And the whole insect has a metallic sheen. 

LINKS:
Blade Runner (there is a game as well as a movie)
http://www.fantascienza.com/cinema/blade-runner/ http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/jan98/brp02.html

Experiment for kids regarding leaves
http://www.scholastic.com/magicschoolbus/games/teacher/rot/print.htm