TITLE: 8am bus ride
NAME: Stephen Lumini
COUNTRY: Canada
EMAIL: s_lumini@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: members.xoom.com/slumini
TOPIC: The City
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 8ambusri.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio Max

TOOLS USED: 
    Paint Shop Pro 6

RENDER TIME: 
    22 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    P2 400 w 128M RAM

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Freakin' idiot bus driver.  Don't they teach them to avoid turbulence!  Did they
teach them to pump the gas instead of the brake, or what? The people stuck
standing are swaying like wheat in a windswept field.  At least I got lucky and
scored a window seat.  The view is spectacular, riding the ground bus was never
like this!  
---------------
As the title, 8am bus ride, hopefully suggests, those are buses taking people to
work in "the City".  Imagine that there are no big cities on the ground any
more, just suburbs. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

In terms of technique, it is a pretty simple picture.  In my POV days most of
this would have been done is sPatch, due to the very curvey feel I wanted for
the City and the airbuses.  I did the same things 3DS I would have done in
sPatch - traced the shapes, extruded them, bent them, etc..  Tedious, yes,
complicated, no.

The city buildings are a single Scatter object (sort of a Randomized array, that
also lets me give it a range for Scale (say btwn 90% and 100%) and rotation
(e.g. -10 to +10 degrees in the z-axis).  This obviously made it very easy to
make the core city.  I modelled 6 buildings, made them one object and then
scattered them over the surface of a cone.  The "arm" cities are the same
technique, but instead of a cone they surface a "warped" box.
The detail of windows, etc. is done through a checkered texture applied as both
a specular map and a bump map. 

The moon is a sphere with a image map texture and an opacity map to give it that
half a moon look.  It took quite a number of tries to get the moon image map
the shade of blues I wanted!

The cloud background is a customized image map.  I took pieces of different
cloud pictures I had, and then adjusted the RGB to get the golden glow I wanted
for sunrise.  I really did try to use some kind of fog/media, but it just was
not even slightly close to the look I wanted.  I do consider that image maps
for backgrounds is a bit like cheating, but the background does play such a
large role in the feel of this picture...and I did spend quite a lot of time
"making" it.  OK enough rationalization for now...

There are 4 lights in the picture.  I have recently read a tutorial on camera
lighting for ffilm and rendering (many many commonalities).  Things like the
rim light on the left side of the dome, I would never have thought of...

Signature hunters: it's obviously on the plane - though for the first time it is
not the standard Red/Green.  I felt that the standard colours distracted from
the overall picture, and modified them accordingly.

I also want to mention that I have always taken great great pride in the fact
that my images were always accurate in terms of scale and object placement. 
You could move the camera anywhere and things still worked.  Well, this one is
a great big lie!!  Nothing is to scale, or necessarily in the proper position -
which in some ways made it easier and in others very difficult.  

