Chris Griffin

GriffMech@GNN.com

The image is of a single tracked tank-like vehicle which has been ravaged by the harsh weather conditions on a distant imaginary world. Thin clouds race through the sky, bringing severe pseudo-lightning (not very convincing, is it?) which has damaged the vehicle. The trag has also sunken slightly in the sand, and shows lots of impact damage at the right front end. It was produced entirely in Imagine 4.0 DOS, except for application of the copyright notice text.

The vehicle is based upon a discontinued toy which was produced by Mattel. Its sides were created extensively in the Forms Editor, and the Hide Points command was used to simplify clean-up of the slice operations used with the intersecting swept surfaces. The body utilizes Imagine's procedural textures exclusively as follows: Blast near the flaming/smoking region, scaled via editing the axes; Crumpled on the right front body half;Dirt and Scratch on the entire vehicle on an underlying bed of Hexez. The track section has Stamped applied on the individual tread section pairs which have been copied about an asymmetrical oval path. In addition, these have Dirt and Scratch applied. Venetian was applied to the canopy glass. Smoke and fire coming from the energy conduit is a blob object composed of 3 spheres which has been modified with magnetism. One subgroup has Fire applied to it, while the other is Clouds with a dark gray color. (I originally attempted to use fog attributes and one of the fog textures, but the fog depth setting created too drastic of a difference between close objects, such as the trag, and distant objects, such as the clouds.) Terrain is essentially a magnetism modified plane with Terra applied, and Statue in certain subgroups, such as in the vicinity of the trag. The lightning is a transparent deformed disk with DancSprk and Spark applied to it. (I'm really not entirely happy with the results of this item.)

Within the Stage Editor, the objects were arranged and scaled, using quick render to make sure that the clouds and smoke had the intended extent. The camera was placed slightly above the scene and tracked to the trag's front tread cog prior to final aiming. Four lights were placed in the scene: a. Overhead Spot Light with parallel rays and casting shadows enabled; b. Underside illumination Light with spherical default; c. Fill Light #1 with spherical default, and; d. Fill Light #2 with parallel rays in circular pattern. Finally, the Action Editor was used to apply ambient light on the order of 17 to 23, and a touch of global fog. Rendering was done to .TIF format @ 1500x1000 pixels in ray trace mode, which is a good size and format for producing slides at a service bureau.

The rendered image was imported into Hijaak Touch-Up for application of the copyright notification text. This was then converted to JPEG for submission. ABOUT THE ARTIST Chris Griffin is a Mechanical Engineer who's interests in instrumental jazz and neoclassical fusion, bass guitar, hand percussion, ancient musical instruments, robots, nanotechnology, science fiction, and exotic creatures (real and fictional) lead him to some unusual medium to high resolution models which just may be suitable for something you have in mind. Rest assured that his 3D model and image portfolio is growing, albeit slowly.