My Imaginarium - The Digital Artwork of Gary Vennié

Pavo Cristatus Oceanus

Bryce 4, L-System 4, Photo-Paint 9
Stats: 23,336 polygons smoothed 180 deg.
Render time: 4 hours

This took about two weeks to develop (I'm still learning.). The model is derived from the Lj Lapre 'Airhorse' model that comes with L-System 4. I unwound the neck, added a false neck and spines and recursed the 'lung' mesh one more time for more detail. It took about two days of playing with L-System until I got something I wanted to work with. I worked up four different models before deciding on this one. My original model had much more detail (163K + polygons).

Originally, I used 19 light sources inside the model. But that proved to be a real problem in render time, even on my Athlon 500. The light sources gave me a lot of control but dang, doesn't 49 days to render sound excessive? Maybe I should look for a quad processor SGI machine. Anyway, I dumped that idea and explored using a colored sun and tweaked materials. That worked much better than I expected.

The rest of the time was spent in adjusting the transparencies of the individual meshes and tweaking the material properties to create the translucent/irridescent look. That meant a lot of plop-rendering as I wanted to do this without any post processing to remove unwanted reflections. In the end, I needed to use Photo-Paint to adjust the contrast and intensity.

I must be nuts...I enjoyed every minute of working on this. Even the long render times in the early development experiments.