TITLE: Shared Water
NAME: Stephen Lumini
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: slumini@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: N/A
TOPIC: Desert
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sharedwa.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3DS Max

RENDER TIME: 
    39 25 minutes

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A mother fetches water for her family with her young son in tow.  A stranger
enters the Oasis...

I want to mention that I am not attempting a photorealistic image.  The style I
am trying for is along the lines of Micheal Whelan or Alex Ross - the image is
realistically portrayed (shadows, dirt, reflections, etc) but could never be
confused with a photograph.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Starting top to bottom
The sky is just the Enviroment set to pale blue.
The palm leaves (they cast the shadows) are not visible in the picture and as
such are just lines put into the right shape and extruded.  I did texture them
properly so that their slight reflection in the water would look ok. 

The trees are just two cylinders with a very small noise value and bend
modifier.  The real work is in the mulit layer diffuse texture and bump map. 
They are both procedureal - Diffuse is made up of Smoke with a sub map of
Gradient Ramp.
The bump is a Mix map of the above diffuse map and an Electric map with a mix
amount of 15.
The vine climbing the tree is a loft object.  I first created the line and set
the properties to Renderable and Display as Mesh - this way I could position
the "path" without having to render the image after every vertex tweak.  The
"shape" is a simple circle.  Once I created the loft, I played with the scale
settings so that the vine was not uniform across it's entire length.
The white flower petals are Boxes (with one Length segment and 4 width
segements) - I applied an Edit Mesh and stretched the vertices into rough
positions, then I applied a Mesh Smooth.  Finally I added two Bend parameters,
one for horizontal bend and the other the the axial bend.  This is the same
method used for all the flower heads.  I manually placed all the white flowers.
 The leaves for the vine are made the same as the flower petals - I applied
those to the vine using Scatter.
Background sand is a simple box with alot of noise and then a meshsmooth.  It
has it's very own light and was excluded from the other lights in the image -
the light is an omni set behind and a bit above of the highest dune, so I can
get the highlight along the top of the dunes.  The light strenght is set to 11.
 Texture info - The Diffus is Cellular with Fractal noise and Circular cells,
the bump is an Instance of the Diffuse. 

The Boy - 
The headdress is a Box with only a few length and width segements - I used a few
Edit Mesh modifiers  to position the vertices and then Meshsmooth (I used other
Edit Meshes to add cut lines).  To texture it with the checker pattern, I
cloned the finished headdress and removed all the Edit Mesh modifiers used to
move the verrtices, leaving me with a flat box that still had all the extra
lines I added.  This is critical because Morph Target only works when the two
objects have the exact same vertices and lines. Before using Morph Target, I
applied the checker texture to the flat headress.  When the Morph target
deformed the box, the checker pattern followed the flow properly.  I still had
to tweak out some vertices to minimize the stretching.  The headband is just
three lines set to Renderable.
The boy's face was created using two pictures of my son and following part of
this tutorial
http://3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp
I cannot say enough great things about this tutorial.  It goes through the
entire steps to create a humanoid figure from clothing to head creating to
adding bones for posing. It has helped me soooo much!!
So getting back to the head - I used the above tutorial and basically
molded/traced the images to make the head.  I used the body portion of the
tutorial to create the base clothing, and used the Chamfer/Cut technique
mentioned in the Glove section to create the wrinkles.  I also used the glove
technique to make the hands.
The red ornamentation on the boy's clothes are just lines with some noise and
the Lattice modifier.
The texture on the boy's face is a multi layer - with one layer for the skin and
one layer for the lips (the lips have roughly the same texture with slightly
higher specular value.)  The skin texture is a Noise with a smoke and speckle
sub-texture.  I also added eyelashes with a pure black texture.  Becasue they
are so small in the picture, they are just 40 or so simple cones with a bend
modifier manually placed around the eyes.  The Eye texture is the only bitmap
texture in the whole image.  Again because of the small size they are onyl
spheres and not properly made eyes.

The greenery
The foliage is made using two techniques - the first is creating small Quad
Patches or boxes and the using Edit Patch/Mesh to roughly sculpt the objects. 
Once they are finished then I converted them to editable mesh and using the
Compound Object called Scatter, I positioned them on the "Sand" (I use the
Selected Mesh property with high Rotation values and Scale set to 90%).  The
trick I learned (especially for grass) is to actually make three or four
different objects with slightly different properties and textures.  In this
image I have three "types" of grass (each with a slightly different green
texture), and clover, as well as the flowers.


The water is a simple box with a slightly opaque and slightly reflective
texture.  Additionaly, once I placed the jug, I Cut some new lines in the water
around the mouth of the jug.  I then lifted the edges and lowered the middle to
create the effect of the water rushing in.
The jug is a combination Lathe object (for the body) and a Loft object (for the
handle) - as with the trees this texture it quite "deep" - basically a Gradient
Ramp with a dozen shades, a Mix map, and Electric again.


Lighting
This is always the easiest and hardest part for me.  Easy because you can create
a light that only affects one object in the image and hard because you have to
tweak like crazy to get it just right and I usually end up with a dozen or so
lights.
This image has 10 lights - one overhead (as the sun, casting shadows), one for
the background sand, three on the water, and the rest are highlight lights, for
example, a spotlight affecting only the trees and making the light line along
the right side of the trees.
A good basic lighting tutorial can be found at
http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html and
http://www.warpedspace.org/lightingT/part1.htm

