TITLE: Spiderdawn
NAME: Michael Scholz
COUNTRY: Germany
EMAIL: info@michaelscholz.de
WEBPAGE: http://www.michaelscholz.de
TOPIC: Insects and Spiders
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: spdrdawn.jpg
ZIPFILE: spdrdawn.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    3DStudioMax

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop for texture preparation, copyright text and jpg-file

RENDER TIME: 
    7 minute 20 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
    Dual PII400, 256MB Ram


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


I started out with an idea about colors, mood and camera-
angle with a spider to be shown quite huge from below and
with a red dawn sky. My local library had fine books with
pictures of spiders - they were great modeling reference.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


Modeling

All parts of the spider started out as spheres which were
squeezed, stretched, bent and tweaked into shape. My gras
is made out of opacity mapped planes. Another plane makes
the ground, with a noise modifier added for some denting.

Texturing

The spider's textures are procedural noise maps. They are
mixed together and used as bumpmap, too. To make the maps
for the gras I scanned real gras and edited the images in
Photoshop. There's a gras-texture in my zip-file. The sky
is a blured foto mixed with a gradient. I blured a few of
the gras-textures, too, to get a bit depth of field look.
The ground-texture is a mix of two dirt fotos. A gradient
opacity map fades out to blur the ground in the distance.

Lighting

Each part of the scene has its individual lighting. There
are two lights for the spider (one strong spot light from
above and a subtle omni below), and about three spots for
the grasblades and ground. The spot for the spider, which
make the bright specular on its body, would have been too
much for the gras, therefore I choose to split the light.

