(sorry for file size)
The file is called desert, but I'm not sure where they are exactly, as I've never seen a desert that shiny before. Then again, I've never seen a catepillar in an aquarium (terrainium?) before either.
I wasn't real sure what my goal was when I set out to make the "cool" scene for the project, but I'm happy with what I have (although more time would have been nice, I spent 2 days working on refraction, and I'm not sure there was a problem to begin with). I wanted to do something "real", meaning not just random shapes (like the image below), but I didn't have texture maps, and I only had spheres and triangles to work with. Now, normally triangles are great, but not when you have to plot them by hand :( (read my previous entry about the files to see that it wasn't that bad).
So I first figured a flower would be a good choice, my flower ended up looking kinda dorky but I liked it anyway. Then just a field with flowers or something seemed kinda lame to me. Then I though something in a fish tank would be cool, and allow to show off a bit of refraction too, then I decided a catepillar, because they're made out of spheres, right? I'm not sure if they're really yellow or not, but they were in Super Mario World, so I figure it's ok.
I'm a little disappointed in the grass in the tank, I spent a bunch of time plotting it out on paper to make sure I could type it in and have kind of uneven ground (like in the flower picture below), and with the lighting you can hardly tell. That's why I raised that one part all high in the middle.
Another thing this picture doesn't really show off is my shadows. Which sucks because I spent a lot more time than I should have on it. See, I made sure that transparent objects cast a less than black shadow, and that was easy, but getting multiple transparent objects to add their shadows together was surprisingly difficult to get right, and now it looks all cool but you can't tell here :(. Maybe I can show a bunch of "cool" pics :).
I also totally just realized that the rock the catepillar is on sorta looks like a turtle...if I have time it may become that :).
Anyway, I really totally need some sleep, later.
Raytracers have that annoying quality of looking really cool to anyone who has ever spent the effort to write one, but taking an immense amount of modelling and lighting work to look good to everyone else. I feel your pain [wink]