Entry #02

Filename: Santas_Little_Helper.jpg
Created by: Eki Halkka
E-Mail: erkki.halkka@kolumbus.fi
Web-Site: http://www.kolumbus.fi/erkki.halkka

Artist's Comments
"Santa's little helper"

The story behind this one is that I am from Finland, the place Santacomes from (No, he's not from the north pole...), and I really hate thewinter & the arctic climate! So, if I ever had the time to have aChristmas vacation, the only ice I'd like to be near would be in theglass, floating in an exotic drink! It's sad but no, it's not me in thepicture.

This one was created from scratch in LW3d 5.6, except for the reflectedgirl, wich is an image downloaded from the net (Altavista, beach babes!)-a bit out of rules, but gimme mercy...

I started playng around with metanurbs, trying to model a human face forthe first time. I ended up doing the basic figure and the noseseparately, freezing & booleaning them together. After polygon reducing& smoothing they blended quite nicely together, and the remaining fewbad polygons were hidden by the sunglasses. For the skin I scanned theback of my hand and tiled it to seamless texture in Photoshop 5.0, andused it as a spherical map.

The sunglasses were made with rail extrusions, booleans and magnet tool(My favourite). All materials in them are quite basic LW procedurals.The reflected girl is a flat, clipmapped, unseen by camera polygon. Theglass is basic stuff, lathe, booleans, etc. Surfaces include a Photoshop-created bump map: render clouds, render difference clouds a few timesto get the desired effect, and then find edges. (Try it!)The hat & clothing are extruded paths, again deformed with bend &magnet, surfacing is very basic except for the fur wich i created withsteamer. For the backdrop i used a flat plane with Photoshop enhancedskytracer image, and the water is 100% reflective polygon with fractalbumps. It's animateable too! No need for freak polygoncount...

It took me one long (03:00 am) evening to make this, and the render timewith highest possible settings in every possible aspect was 7 1/2 hourson dual 450 Mhz P2. Polygon count is ridiculous 200 000 , but I was inno hurry... The output is 100% Lightwave rendered, and everything(except for Photoshop) I used came with the basic LW 5.6. I had funmaking this, (surely beats the everyday flying logos & openers...) hopeyou like the image!

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