Entry #15

Filename: FinalBattle.jpg
Created by: Dave Charnow
E-Mail: qdavidc@primenet.com
Web-Site: http://www.primenet.com/~qdavidc

Artist's Comments
All the models are made by me in the last six months . No other Applications besides Lightwave were used in this picture . No plugins were used in this picture . I made the Planet in three sections , Water, Land & Clouds . i made my own elevation map to use as a displacement map . The water has crumple used as a bumpmap for the waves and a velocity of 30 feet per second . The Galactica is the latest model made from Scans of the original and the Revell plastic model with slight variations to it . The Colonial Viper is the oldest and smallest polycount model . The Cylon Raider was the second model I made and i modelled it from a Cylon Raider toy i found at a Good Will store and added my own detail to it . The Cylon Base Star is a 10 piece model all mirrored around a central point and was modelled from Scans of the original model . This scene has 133 objects , 296 Raytracable lights , 65 megs of image maps , and a total of 1,387,424 polygons in it . I set it up as a Binary Star System with the main star behind ,above and to the left of the camera set at 70% . The second star is set to 30% with lens flare set to 200% mainly to backlight the Base Star so it is more visible against the stars and space in the background . the Cylon Laser Bolts are just red lights with outer ring on the lens flare turned off and the light value set to 2% . The Viper blasts are just tubes capped with a hemisphere at each end with fractal noise and glow on the surface . Setting it up was difficult to get the lighting correct due to the vast distances the scale of every model is exactly 1/100th scale and the bright star in the picture is at 20,000 km distance from the camera . The two lights left the Planet so bright i dropped its Diffuse level to 40% so it wouldnt look like a lightbulb was inside it making it glow. the Ambience is set at 0% so the shadows (where there are shadows) would fall very dark . Everything was rendered in one pass except the explosions which i rendered in a second pass and composited them on top .I rendered this on a P150 with 80 megs ram and it took 17 hours 34 minutes and 6 seconds at 1024x768 with enhanced medium Antialiasing on . I hope you enjoy this retro sci-fi picture. Thank you.

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