Entrant: Louis Rundio Sinclair email: rundio@visi.com web: http://www.visi.com/~rundio/

This image is of a squadron of British SE5a planes from World War I. It was created entirely in Imagine, except for the brushmaps and a slight brightness adjustment which were done with Adobe Photoshop.

Most of the modeling was done using Imagine for DOS version 4. The airplane model was refined and re-textured in Imagine for Windows. The information for the model came from scale drawings by W.A. Wylam in a book called "Scale Aircraft Drawings - Volume I -- World War I", "RAF SE5a Windsock Datafile Special", and "RAF SE5a Windsock Datafile 10." I also used photographs I took of an actual SE5a in the London RAF Museum after talking a guard into letting me climb around the airplane inside the barriers.

The picture was assembled in three stages. A scene was built with all the airplanes on the ground and the hangars. I applied a bump map to a textured ground plane for the tracks in the ground. Aligning the bump map with the objects was accomplished by capturing the top view of the scene in the stage editor. I made a solid gray (128,128,128) image and, using Photoshop's layers feature, put a transparent image of my stage top view over my gray image to use as a guide. The airplane tracks were then manually drawn. Going back into Imagine's stage editor, I applied the bump map to the ground and rendered.

Step two was to create a spinning propeller using states. I made a simple scene with the propeller and the image from step 1 as a backdrop. Motion blur was used for the spinning propeller during rendering.

Step three was a very simple scene with the foreground airplane, three lights, and the image from step 2 as a backdrop. As mentioned above, Photoshop was used to adjust the brightness and to add my 'signature.'

This could have been done all in one step, but the rendering time would have been much longer because of the motion blur. The entire rendering (all three steps) took less than an hour to complete on my P120.

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I use Imagine primarily for my own gratification, although I use it on occassion for my 'real' job as a computer analyst/programmer. It is great for web page graphics, and to create title screens for Windows applications. I also created an 'Interactive Media Kit' that contained over five minutes of Imagine-generated animation. I also have done free-lance work using Imagine for album covers and promotional posters for a local band. I'm also working on a music video using Imagine for most of the visuals.