The Making Of "Electricity Of Life"

"Electricity Of Life" was the second essay into a new series of images I am calling "A Home For Technology". The series, and the image, represent my fascination with those strange industrial utility buildings which conceal so much of purpose behind blank facades, and which, by their placement in nature, signal the closeness of man's technology and the world in which it is created. The first in this series, "The Brick House", was done with Aladdin, but the need for complex interobject cutting and true glass objects made it essential to use Imagine for this project.

This image started with my enjoyment of the old mill complex that houses the Prime Climb indoor climbing gym. These old buildings are brick with a fine dark patina of age. The sodium lights in the complex often cast fascinating glows and shadows across the building surfaces, leaving mysterious spaces at night.

Combined with this was a building which used to sit at the edge of the Pratt & Whitney complex near my original home in East Hartford. The purpose of the building is something I never learned, but it was filled with pipes that caught the light and shaded each other in a variety of ways. I loved the resemblance to the complexity of living organisms - especially single-celled creatures whose membranes and organelles are connected in a variety of ways.

Originally, working on this was just a pause in my progress on Penta, which had become frustrating due to my inability to properly handle the camera and track paths. Then, as the weeks stretched past a month, it was clear this needed to be a major work in its own right.

The result is based on the most complex set of objects I have ever created. Because of the wide variety of techniques required to make this image realistic, I have broken this workshop into several parts:

• Building And Windows - modeling issues and the use of bitmaps to create solid objects.
• Pipes And Trees - creating part kits for complex objects and using particle systems to simulate realistic trees and bushes.
• Torches, Electricity, Fern, and Background Trees - the use of filter maps for flames and color maps on transparent objects.
• Miscellaneous Items: Hands, Cobblestones, Puddle, and Lighting Management