PC World 1999 July/PCWorld_1999-07_cd.bin/galerie/PovRay/quetzal.txt

Text File | 1999-05-05 | 4KB | 87 lines

TITLE: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
NAME: Ashton Mason
COUNTRY: South Africa
EMAIL: [e-mail]
WEBPAGE: http://www.cs.uct.ac.za/~amason/silicon.trip/Quetzalcoatl/
TOPIC: History
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: quetzal.jpg
RENDERER USED:
    3D Studio MAX

TOOLS USED:
    Photoshop, Unwrap modifier for MAX

RENDER TIME:
    45 minutes

HARDWARE USED:
    Pentium 2, FIRE GL 1000 Pro OpenGL card

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:


My image depicts the return of the god Quetzalcoatl to the ancient city of
Teotihuacan. Situated in modern day Mexico and believed to have been built
in around 100AD, the city was already ancient and deserted in the time of
the Aztecs. The name Teotihuacan is an Aztec word meaning something like
"the city where the gods were made".

Quetzalcoatl ("feathered snake") was worshipped by nearly all the
pre-columbian South and Central American cultures, and predates even
Teotihuacan. He symbolises variously the wind, the sun, a bringer of
civilization, and the spiritual (bird) and earthly (snake) nature of man.
The Quetzalcoatl depicted here is my interpretation of the feathered snake
god worshipped at Teotihuacan, and the statue of Quetzalcoatl in the
foreground is modelled on the carved heads that adorn the Temple of
Quetzalcoatl there (see the web page for pictures). These carved heads also
seem to resemble pumas.

In my depiction of the god himself I tried to portray Quetzalcoatl descending
from the sky as the people of Teotihuacan might have imagined him. The
imagery is intended to be strongly psychedelic, reflecting the influence of
the use of peyote cactii and psilocybin mushrooms at Teotihuacan on its
culture, religion and art.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:


All objects were created with mesh modeling (that is, by creating a simple
initial mesh primitive and then refining it into the correct shape by means
of successive operations on vertices, faces, and edges). In the case of all
objects except the pyramids a control mesh was used to simplify the modeling
process. The final mesh is then a referenced copy of the control mesh with
a MeshSmooth modifier applied to it.

The statue and pyramids were closely modelled on the originals, from pictures
of Teotihuacan found in books and on the web. The temples at the tops of the
pyramids no longer exist, so some artist's licence was required there :)

Bumps maps were used extensively to create the impression of detail. In the
case of the statue, all the surface details such as the spiral ear design,
nostrils and patterning around the eyes were created with bump maps, hand-
drawn in Photoshop to resemble those on the original statues. I used the
freeware Unwrap modifier by Peter Watje to align the textures with the
geometry.

To make the ground and pyramids more realistic "muck maps" were used to
simulate surface dirt. Basically, hand-drawn greyscale textures were used to
selectively replace the actual surface texture with black dirt (along the
edges of the stairs, for example). Muck maps help to create realism by
simulating the accumulation of dirt in places where it would likely occur.

For the texture on the pyramid walls and the cracked earth in the near
foreground I used a texture by Nik Palmer that I found at 3DCafe. All the
other textures were created in MAX using procedural maps or hand-drawn in
Photoshop. Many of them combine several levels of Noise maps in order to
create more complex and believable results.

Volume lights were used to create the light rays and green haze. The light
rays themselves were created by surrounding the light with a shade made by
deleting some faces from a geodesic dome, and were coloured by making the
light a projector light with a gel image created in Photoshop. The sky is
a background texture created in Photoshop.