The LightWave Mailing List Contest
Hall of Fame


June 1998 - Natural Shaders

CLICK HERE to view June's voting results

CLICK HERE to read people's comments about June's entries


All entries for June's contest needed to use AT LEAST TWO of the LightWave v5.6 Natural Shader plugins in the final image.    The challenge was to combine some of the shaders together and create a more complex image, but aside from that, entry images could be of anything at all.
1st Place

    Entry #9
    Filename: FallsFinal.jpg
    Created by: Chris Nelson
    E-Mail: cnelson@iag.ner
    Web-Site: ???

    Artist's Comments
    "Waterfall"

    This image took about 2 hours to render on a DEC 500 with shadows, enhanced AA, and steamer cranked up. 177k polygons comprise the scene, much of which is tied up in the foliage (created with the help of Onyx Tree Pro). The two youths enjoying their swim are modified Poser objects. Because of the way steamer works with the zbuffer, I was forced to comp in a rendered version waterfall in post. The water shader was obviously very useful here. The waterfall itself actually doesn't have the shader applied due to the way it is additive to existing transparency settings. Steamer provided the spray at the falls, and a thin additive fog to the surface of the pool. The snow shader became the "grass & moss shaders" and the landscape has two instances of the grass shader, with luminosity mapping to control the shape of the path. Additionally, the rust shader enhanced the rocky surface (you can see it on the inside walls). A level adjustment was made in post to boost the intensity to help make the tropical daytime look come out.
2nd Place

    Entry #4
    Filename: Lurking.jpg
    Created by: Göran Bäckman
    E-Mail: goran@mbox341.swipnet.se
    Web-Site: http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73956/

    Artist's Comments
    "Lurking at the Bay"

    This image uses the two new natural shaders Rust and Water. It's quite obvious where they are applied, but the settings could be more difficult to guess. All the rusty surfaces use the same settings,

    Slopes used
    Drops mode
    Radius Min 0.1, Max 0,2
    Fractal Bumps, Scale 0.1, Amplitude 1.0, Granulosity 20

    And the water goes as follows,

    Color Filter used
    Refraction 1,3
    Max Reflection at 0 deg, 70%
    Min Transparency at 0 deg, 10%
    Wavelets used, Scale 5m
    Depth Attenuation at 2m, 100%


    Apart from these changes, the default settings were used. The whole image took approximatly 4 hours to render on a pre-historic P-133 with 128 Mb of RAM. Area Light was used to add realism, and render time. *sigh* There are 350.000 polygons in the scene, 13 images and 19 lights, all point lights except from the sun. A few pixels were altered in Photoshop.



Third Place

    Entry #10
    Filename: Possibilities.jpg
    Created by: Rod Bland
    E-Mail: bwerks@pangea.ca
    Web-Site: ???

    Artist's Comments
    "Possibilities"

    I used this month's topic as a platform for building props and an environment for this chicken character I recently created. The natural shaders seemed to be a ticket for bumping up my overall productivity and aesthetic surface appearances. This assumption turned out to be partially correct.

    I built the car in a metanurb frenzy of about four hours. The make is nothing specific; I just went for general 1950's characteristics to avoid being constrained by making all those pesky measurements etc. After applying the snow shader (to car and field - see settings below) I got pretty excited as the snow went on almost exactly the way I wanted it, changing parameters made obvious differences - doesn't get any more "push button" than that!

    The rust was another story altogether. I had the "crawling" texture phenomenon beat (not like this car'll be driving anywhere soon), after fiddling with the parameters for quite a while and previewing without antialiasing I was sure I had come up with a combo that would look good. Lo and behold - a medium res render revealed my separate rust polygons as clearly as if I had surfaced each one uniquely. It was at this point that the online manual warning to use straight geometry (as opposed to smooth surfaces) made itself rather apparent - doh! I had slightly more success with the rust shader on the chrome parts primarily by using very low values for the min & max radius. In the end my aesthetic ethic overruled the purist value and I broke down and cooked up additional rust maps/mattes generated through "Darktree" software. For what it's worth I've included relevant rust shader settings used on chrome below.

    I used the water shader with moderate success and found that I could get some reasonably good ice effects. I used this shader to 'frost' my front windshield as well as get the slick "melted and refrozen" patches in the snow. As recommended by a number of people on the mailing list I used this shader in conjuction with a "crumple" bump map and got what I was looking for. See settings below. Additional spotlight focused on foregound helped bump up the gleam.

    Other info about this image.

    The car totalled 28000 polys and the chicken is at 9000 (metamate 1 - I'd probably bump it up to 2 for a head shot). The snow field is a subdivided plane jittered in Y, the icy patches are simply a flat plane with shader. Since I don't have fiber factory or anything capable of generating 'grass' I first tried single point poly extrusions which looked really lame - particularly at higher resolutions. I wound up extruding and tapering a triangular xsection, and spreading it about in a spartan 'winter prairie grass'-like fashion. The cloud was derived from a rendering of the chicken that was warped and filtered through Darktree's "cloud filter" and inserted as the background. This project was done on a rather anemic 166 mhz Dec Alpha with 80 mb of ram (this unit will be replaced shortly - very shortly!)

    *altered shader settings.
    Snow: contrast 5%, snow amount 13.8%, diffusion 93%, fractal bumps - scale .4, amp 2, granulosity 20, color1 250, 252, 255, color2 140, 142, 189

    Rust: Mode - drops, rust amount 8%, rust grain 73%, min radius .01, max radius .05, smoothness 80%, rust shading diffuse 60%, color1 119, 79 10, color2 24, 19, 0

    Water: wavelets .2





Honorable Mentions
Here are the other images entered into the June 1998 contest:



Entry #01
Filename: SnowIsland.jpg
Created by: Bill Hemenway
Entry #02
Filename: UFO-Mountain.jpg
Created by: Kev Roast
Entry #03
Filename: Statue.jpg
Created by: Vassilios K. Kontodimas
Entry #05
Filename: SilentSoldier.jpg
Created by: Scott Cameron
Entry #06
Filename: Treasure.jpg
Created by: Jeffrey Shaikh
Entry #07
Filename: RiggerDream.jpg
Created by: Peter Bowmar
Entry #08
Filename: StoneLantern.jpg
Created by: Ron Dutcher




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