9/7/01
The final image of the Dramatic Rust series, this was based on the scene created for "The Last Ray Of Sun". But in this scene, the sun is gone, and the rain has arrived.
Many complex challenges were part of making this image realistic.
The image below shows the structure of the scene...
In the upper portion of the scene, you can see the two spheres which make up the volume textured virga. The texture, while not complex, required significant tweaking to produce the requisite transparency and thready structure. It is based on the Fire texture, with all color removed, a very weak base density, high fuzziness, and with ambience and diffusion set from the texture.
In red are the selected rain drops, created by creating an ellipse, multi-replicating it, 3D Disperse and Size application, and rotation. The objects were then elongated in object space, and a fuzzy semi-transparent material applied.
A cube with a volumetric cloud texture was used to create the ground hugging clouds. However, it is simply chance that produced the complexity of cloud flows across the ground, and their terrain following characteristics are nothing more than coincidental.
The image below shows the drops from the surface of the artifact...
A final step was to simulate the apparent wetness of the artifact. This was the result of painstaking trial and error that included attempts at creating thin water layers from duplicates of the artifact components. I had nearly given up, when a slight tweak to the reflectivity of the objects produced exactly the correct look.