TITLE: Puddle
NAME: Michael Hunter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: intertek@one.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net
TOPIC: Decay
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: puddle.jpg
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



