TITLE: Garbage Cat Caught in the Act
NAME: Michael Hunter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: intertek@one.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net
TOPIC: From Rubbage Bin to Junkyard
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: g_cat.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio Max Version 8

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps)

RENDER TIME: 
    1 Hour 16 Minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 768 MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

To you an old, half-eaten fish is garbage but if you were a cat you would see
how appetizing my image really is. There's no better meal than one that is
stolen under the cover of darkness. This is commando cuisine at it's finest.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Modeling
My favorite method of modeling is a process called box modeling because you can
work more directly than with NURBS. An alternative process is to use the
surface modifier on a spline cage. This is a fine way to work as well but I
often feel frustrated with the restrictions of matching up vertices. Box
modeling starts with a basic primitive - the choice of which depends on the
shape you wish to make. Faces can be extruded, subdivided, fused and deleted.
You can also extend the mesh by selecting one or more edges and shift dragging
them to create a new row of faces. Most organic items where created this way.
Lathe was used for the handle and lamp. Wires and cords were made with lofts.
Boolean was used to remove flesh from the fish.

One tricky part was the eyes. They seemed absolutely dead if the texture map was
simply applied on a sphere. I'm including a link to some tutorials about eyes
but the basic idea is to mimic nature as closely as possible. So these eyes
have a pupil, cornea, and iris along with the white of the eye.

The spine was made using "Snapshot". It's a pretty nice feature for making
repetitive objects. There's a good tutorial on it that ships with Max. But the
general idea is you make one vertebra then animate it. I used a path constraint
to animate mine. Then I scaled the vertebra on the last frame so it changed
size as it moved along the path. Snapshot then made a "Snapshot" of that one
vertebra from different frames to create a complete spine. Each vertebra
followed the path while gently changing scale. An alternative method would have
been to use Free-Form Deformation (FFD) on an unchanging column of vertebra.
Though this would have been faster it is harder to control for this purpose.
Snapshot also works well for fern leaves. You can morph the original object to
more drastically change shapes.

Textures
I tried the hair and fur plug-in but I was not satisfied with how the fur
interacted with the head on lighting. Instead I wrestled a photo of a cat into
the shape required by my mesh. It was not easy.

The fish texture seemed to work out with less fuss. It has a metal shader with a
hand drawn bump map and diffuse color map.

Scum Buster bottle blends two textures, a semi-transparent texture for the
plastic bottle and an opaque texture for the label. The transparent texture
uses "fall-off" to make it more opaque on the edges.

Lighting
There are two lights; a photometric spotlight centered on the cat (like a beam
from a flashlight) and a blue area light off on the right side to fill in the
shadows a bit.


LINKS:
How to make an eye tutorial by Adam Baroody
http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/59/1

A more Natural human eye tutorial by Steven James
http://users.tinyworld.co.uk/steven_tubbrit/Workshop/Nurbs/Eye/Photorealistic_Eye
_01.htm

