EMAIL: intertek@one.net NAME: Michael Hunter TOPIC: Architecture COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. TITLE: Anthill COUNTRY: USA WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net/ RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max TOOLS USED: 3D Studio Max, SimbiontMAX, Photoshop RENDER TIME: 10 Hours 3 Minutes (at 1280 x 1024) HARDWARE USED: Pentium 1.8 MHz IMAGE DESCRIPTION: At first glance, my image looks like a picture about the ancient roots of western architecture. This is the stuff banks, libraries and courthouses throughout the world are based on. It is traditional, proper, and timeless. But if you look closer you will notice ants and their anthill. The ants are going about their business without the slightest concern for the collapse of the ancient city. Why should they care? Millions of years before the city was made they where building their humble anthills. They made their sandy homes while the ancient people first erected their stone walls. I suspect the ants will be building their homes long after the last traces of mankind have turned to dust (perhaps they will be making their architecture out of that dust). DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: This image spent most of it's development time in my head. I took a couple of tries at other ideas but this one kept reasserting itself as an image about architecture rather than simply an image of architecture. As with nearly all of the images I make, I spent lots of time on the web looking at pictures of ants and classical columns. There was a difficult design problem with this image. How do you show small ants and huge architecture at the same time? I thought about pulling the camera right up close on the lead ant and just let the architecture be background. Though that was very dynamic it lost the point of the image. You have to see the architecture first then notice the ants, wonder why they are there and then come to the conclusion that the image is about the timelessness of their architecture and culture not about ours. I solved this problem by keeping the little ones small but using focal blur to keep them isolated from the background enough so that you had to eventually consider them. They are not going away. Their voices will be heard. Technically, I haven't really invented anything new. The only technical challenge here is to get the lighting, textures, focal blur and models all working together. Having a clear idea before starting the image was very helpful. Several times I took test renderings and drew on top of them in PhotoShop to test out ideas quickly. The focal blur added many hours to the rendering time so I tried to get all other aspects of the image worked out first and only tested focal blur settings in all night renderings. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this idea further please don't hesitate to email me at intertek@one.net.