TITLE: The Shelter
NAME: Marcelo Carvajal
COUNTRY: Chile
EMAIL: marcelocarvajal@ieee.org
WEBPAGE: http://www.geocities.com/samhein2000
TOPIC: Insects and Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: shelter.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    BMRT 2.6

TOOLS USED: 
    Rhinoceros 1.1, slcEditor Beta 0.7.3.0, Photoshop, WordPad.

RENDER TIME: 
    54 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium III, 600 MHz, 320 MB.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

A sunny spring-day morning after a rainy night, allow us to surprise different
insects sharing this improvised shelter. These tiny beasts know that the flood
will last few hours, for this reason, they tolerate each other, which in other
conditions would be impossible. 
This is the first time I send a picture to the competition, I hope you like it.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

Here is a description of the most important things I did to get this picture:
- All the modeling work was made using NURBS and Rhino3D and exported to RIB to
be rendered with BMRT. Before the rendering process, the RIB file was edited to
set the shaders, light and texture parameters.
- The scene shows a garden that has been flood by a night rain. The water level
is about 2 inches. We can see the sun is shining this morning and the water
surface shows that there's a soft cold breeze.
- The insects and plants were modeled individually according to pictures of real
bugs, before putting them into the scene, so almost all of them could be
visualized with more detail in www.geocities.com\samhein2000.
- I used some shaders that are distributed with BMRT and programmed some other
in order to get the surfaces of some elements in the scene (like the beetles,
the caterpillar and the daisies). The parameters for these shaders were tested
using slcEditor.
- All the textures (pigments and displacements) were designed using Photoshop.
- The center of the daisies (yellow part) was made using a true displacement
shader to get a more realistic surface. I tried using simple bump mapping but
the texture was too flat.
- The petals were made using the velvet shader available in BMRT.
- The leaf floating on the water was made using a NURBS surface (starting from a
hand-made sketch) and bump mapping with true displacements to get the texture.

- The water surface is a plane that has been textured to show the effect of the
breeze.
- The sky is a huge sphere, and its textured to show a few clouds, because the
rain stopped hours ago. Anyway, the sky is only visible as a reflection over
water surface.
- The plants have several different color textures to get a more realistic
background.
- The caterpillar shader was programmed to show a slimy and grainy surface.
- The green grasshopper has a bump texture to get a rough and shiny surface.
- The wings of the dragonfly are transparent but show a few specular reflections
to get a plastic-like look.        


