LightWave Mailing List Contest

The LightWave Mailing List Contest
Hall of Fame

September 1996 - Animal Life

"Mantas at Play" by: Norman Cates (Stormin')
E-Mail: norman@sfmc.org.nz

Through the blue a pod of mantas emerges, gliding through the water, one trailing behind, having just leapt out of the water and now diving behind the others. Well, enough poetry.

The mantas in this scene are 3 instances of the same object. This was so I could show the different parts of it without being artificial about it.
The horns, the mouth, the tail, body and the gills were MetaNURBed as one object. I added the eyes afterwards, and some details were refined by metaforming.

In layout, the manta was boned and the scene saved. In a new scene the manta was loaded three times and each was moved their new positions.
The small bubbles are simply single point polygons. The large bubbles were created using the bubble plug in and then deformed slightly to try and give them some sense of velocity. They were also cloned, then the clone was smooth shifted to a slightly larger size. The Outer Bubble was given a refractive index of 1.33 and the Inner Bubble a refractive index of 1.0. This gives the bubbles their distorting effect. The light beams were the usual extruded sheets of polygons with appropriate transparancy and fractal textures applied. And fog was used to make objects dissapear into the distance.
The sparkles were individual lights with lensflares.

2nd Place

"Ordovician Sea"
Copyright © 1996 Prem Subrahmanyam Graphic Design

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND VIEWING THIS IMAGE AT A FULL 24 BITS, AS IT LOSES SOME SUBTLE TEXTURING WHEN VIEWED AT 16 BITS.

In this image, I attempted to recreate a scene from the distant past at a place called Caesar's Creek, in Ohio, where I went fossil collecting a little over a year ago...all animals depicted in this scene represent actual fossils that I found while there. In this scene, a straight-shelled nautiloid (the octopus/squid-like thingy - Dolorthoceras sp.) pounces toward a trilobite (Flexicalymene meeki) which enrolls itself as a means of protection. A second Flexicalymene scurries off from the area before it gets attacked. Behind the nautiloid to the right is a bryozoan - a colony of little creatures that build structures similar to coral. Speaking of corals - the anemone-like creature behind and to the left of the nautiloid is an extinct type of coral known as a rugose or horn coral. To the right and slightly in front of the enrolled trilobite is a brachiopod (Strophomena sp.) or lampshell -- brachiopods, while bearing no relation to clams, have similar shells to clams. Finally, in the right-foreground is a crinoid (a creature related to starfish, but which live their lives anchored in place via their stalk and a system of root-like holdfasts -- think "inverted starfish on a stalk).

The Flexicalymene was modeled using a combination of Metaform (on the flattish parts of the head), MetaNURBS (on the nose-like part and the segments of the body) and copious rail-cloning (to get the properly scaled segments -- each segment is a separate chunk of geometry). The nautiloid body was made using MetaNURBS...it is a single piece of geometry right down to the suckers on the arms. The nautiloid was textured (both the shell and the body) using Surface Effectors...the bump map on the shell was hand-drawn in Fractal Design Painter, as was the bump map on the brachiopod shell. The bryozoan was made with a few cylinders booleaned together, jittered and metaformed to get a smooth yet varied appearance. The anemone-like polyp on the top of the coral was also MetaNURB'd. Finally, the crown of the crinoid in the foreground was modeled with Metaform, and then individual hexagonal-ish polygon groups were merged and beveled out to create the look of calcified plates. The arms were smooth-shifted in segments to give them a segmented appearance. Finally the stalk consists of a rail-clone array of a single disc. Lighting was done using a spotlight with shadow maps (to give softness to the shadows) and the underwater-ish rippling to the lighting was done by applying the underwater texture to the diffuse-level map of each surface in the scene.

The entire scene took about 4 days worth of work to model, texture, and light, contains 143,000 polygons and took 1 hr 13 min on my P90 at Enhanced High antialiasing.

3rd Place

"Water is Life"
by: Angelo Chiarot
(Impronta Digitale - Milan, Italy)
E-Mail: improntadigitale@digibank.it

Short description
-----------------
(The image has been created 'ALL' with Ligthwave 5.0 and Photoshop was used just for little retouch of raytrace shadow.) First I used some spline-cages to model the six different legs and brown abdomen. With metanurbs I chiselled half body and head, then mirrored. The jaws was only an oval with two paths, extruded using the rail extrude option.

The floor is a simply subdivided and metanurbed plane with a five dragged up & down points. The leaves on the left are a cutted sphere, then metanurbed & duplicated (thank you Fori), with a little cylindrical trunk. The 'animals' are drived out by 96 bones so, for animation, all movements are possible.

Objects: 21
Polygons: 47843
Surfaces: 12
Lights: 6
DOF: On (0.25-5.6)
AA: Medium
Dither: 2 x normal
Render Time: 2h20m on a P120, 64 Mb, 2 Gb, Matrox 2Mb
Software: Lightwave 5.0, Photoshop 3.0

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