8/11/00

This image is a recreation of a well-known UFO sighting at Vins-sur-Caramy, France, on April 14, 1957. It was created with Carrara, while the witness figures were modeled in Poser. The image is based on a site photo taken from the original article in the French magazine Ouranos and on a map and sketch from the same article...

The landscape consists of several terrains, one sculpted to match the combined contours suggested by the map and the photo. A plane was textured to be the road surface, and the terrains were textured with two complex custom shaders - one for the grass in the foreground, and one for the background terrain behind the trees. Trees were constructed from Elm and Maple trees using the Tree Druid extension, and the grass clumps were made in Plant Studio. Indeed, these grass clumps are clones of the same grass clumps used in At The Edge 2. The sky is from a scanned photograph and a second, faint bluish "distant" light at a 120 degree angle is used to simulate its radiance.

A complex multileveled shader was used for the grass, combining cellular, noise, and turbulence with various similar mixers controlling the variations in texture for the color and bump channels.

The curb turned out to be nearly the most troublesome aspect of the model. Because the curb had to follow the contours of the road, the shape was very important. But because it could not be specifically registered against the contours of the terrain, it was necessary to hand draw and modify the curb in the spline editor by trial and error.

The cone was created with a fairly simple three cross sections and extrusion envelope in the spline editor. I tried using a spike deformer on it, but I was unable to prevent the antennae from also extruding from the top of the cone. So I duplicated the cone, turned it into a vertex model, and lopped off the top. Applying the deformer to this cone did not produce any antennae on the dorsal surface, so I made the cone invisible with the deformer settings (so that only the spikes were visible), and placed it inside the spline modeled cone.

The shader for the cone metal was complex, which was due to the need to have a non-reflective surface that did not look like plastic. Several levels of color, reflectivity and bump noise were needed, each mixed with complex subshaders like cellular and turbulence.

Making the figures in Poser was tedious but the greatest difficulty came from getting the right positions to suggest the astonishment of the witnesses.

The sign was made from an image provided by a French researcher. It was mapped onto a transparent thinned cube with a mask. Following the rather unusual Carrara practice, perfect registration was achieved only by subtracting the mask from the image in the color channel while also using the mask in the transparency channel.

Some small fixup in Photostyler was needed to correct some defects on the figures and in the tree background behind the figures.

The image represents position A on the map, just after the object leapt over the metal sign, causing it to rapidly vibrate.

Thanks to Pierre Legrange who provided the original Ouranos article on the case, and to Jacques Poulet, Perry Petrakis and Bernard Thouanel for their assistance in translation, advice and images of the road signs. Additional thanks to Larry Hatch for criticism of the original image. Of course, any errors are my own.