EMAIL: pairgain@worldonline.fr

NAME: Stalex

TOPIC: Fortress

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: Stones And Sand

COUNTRY: FRANCE

WEBPAGE: http://www.multimania.com/stalex

RENDERER USED: 3d Studio Max R3.1' scanline renderer 

TOOLS USED: 	Windows 2000 pro :)
		Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1
		Depth Of Field Pro v1.21 (plugin for 3dsmax)
		Terrain material (texture plugin for 3dsmax)

RENDER TIME: 3h 47 min 57 s  - size : 940 * 600 

HARDWARE USED: Celeron 466 mmx - 256 MB ram - 17" - Geforce 2 GTS 32 MB DDR

/* sorry for my english */

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
	My first idea wasn't to make only a technical drawing of fortress, exactly represented as a photo... I thought this idea was the one of a lot of person... Then I decided to make a paralellism between a real castle and a sand one, created on the beach by a child and his father... "Stones And Sand" represents a big castle at the top of a cliff, and this castle in surrounding a beach which someone has almost created the same castle in, but in sand. Thus we have an artistic paralellism between two kind of fortress.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:
	I created all elements of this scene using 3dsmax. The most diffuclt was to make the transition between the sea and the sand beach. I use a lots of textures to do so... but i don't find the result very excellent...
	A big job was done with this textures... because it's really difficult to represent the nature as it is in a real world. 
	The cliff was made with a displace map I've created in Photoshop (it's working exactly as if it were a height field in Povray, > the map was in black and white and represented the cliff elevation...). Then I textured the cliff using a free plugin called Terrain material, which allowed me to creat two different textures among the inclination degree of the slope. 
	Seagulls was created using a Free Form Deformation (FFD) modifier, they were created from a simple sphere and then deformed.
	The castle is a groupment of a lots of primitive objects, created with some bollean operations. The sand castle is almost the same : I applied a fractal Noise modifier to make it a little more in sand.
	The cloud was made using "combustion", an environment method designed for fire. After a long time I managed to do what i wanted. All cloud were created into gizmo spheres (sham empty objects only created to contain atmospheric object, or fire, smoke ...).
	The render couldn't have been made with mental ray (to simulate radiosity), because it's too difficult to simulate radiosity in an exterior scene.