TITLE: Bellerophon and the Chimaera Beast
NAME: Jhem Murray
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
EMAIL: jhem_m@hotmail.com
WEBPAGE: http://www.jpixel.com
TOPIC: Mythology
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: jhemmyth.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio MAX default renderer

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio MAX v4

RENDER TIME: 
    around 2 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    P4 3 GHz with 768 MB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Bellerophon was the grandson of Sisyphus. He was wrongly accused of trying to
seduce the wife of King Proteus of Argos. Angrily, Proteus sent Bellerophon
from his court with a letter to deliver to the King of Lycia.

The letter asked the King of Lycia to kill the person who brought it but he did
not want to offend the Furies by murdering a guest. Instead, he asked
Bellerophon to kill the beast called Chimaera to pay for his hospitality. The
Chimaera was a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a
goat and a serpent's tail. The king was sure Bellerophon would fail and be
killed.

Athene decided to help Bellerophon. She lent him her winged horse, Pegasus, and
he flew over the Chimaera and plunged his spear down its throat.

Bellerophon then helped the king by flying above his enemies and pelting them
with rocks. The king could not believe the hero deserved to die after this and
they became friends. Bellerophon even married his daughter.

After a while Bellerophon became too proud. He tried to fly to Olympus on
Pegasus. No human was allowed in the home of the gods without an invitation, so
Bellerophon had to be punished. Zeus sent a fly that drove Pegasus wild. The
hero was thrown from his back and landed in a thorn bush. He was blinded and
lamed, ending his life homeless and alone.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I started off by creating the models for the Chimaera Beast and Pegasus. I used
spline cages which I later converted to polygons for polygonal modelling and
finally smoothed out with MeshSmooth. For the feathers of the Pegasus, I
duplicated one feather around the wingspan and then modified each feather
painstakingly. I used a special plugin for the fur effects, some of the fur is
lines. The cliff edge uses displacement mapping for the different bumps and
cracks. The background is a matte painting I created earlier in MAX and
photoshop, it uses special illustration shaders. The slight dust effect
underneath the beast was created with Afterburn.  The materials for the beasts
are several blend materials, mainly a color map, a bump map, in parts
illustration shaders (pegasus face 10% illustration shader) and other
self-illumination and translucency shaders.



