"Strike a Pose"

The word 'ugly' can be used to describe something threatening or dangerous 
or unappealing to the mind. With these things in mind. I present an image 
entitled 'Horrid'. The inspiration for this piece was my pet spider "Horrid" 
who died during the summer. I now have a replacement but she isn't any where 
near as big or scary as Horrid. The spider is a Woolly Honduras Tarantula 
(or a Chilean Rose I'm not sure which). If the truth be known I have actually 
been working ,time permitting, on this model for quite a while.

Including the hair, the hierarchy of objects totals 461,000 polygons (give or 
take a few) and is animated via a two goal IK set-up on each leg (10 limbs 
including the feeders). Texturing on the spider is fairly simple (no image 
maps) however to get the hair looking good it needs a bit of transparency! 
This does no favours to the render time.

The setting I'v put "Horrid" into is a simple set of models that took several 
evenings to sort out. the door molding uses a morph target to get to its door 
frame shape and allow better control over texturing. The wall paper objects 
are subdivided at the bottom and use morph targets to gain the bulge and curl. 
I used a clip map to 'rip' holes in the paper. 

The textures on the skirting board and door frame were a nightmare to build up. 
the colour channel uses a single plainer image map and an alpha for the peeling 
paint, as do the diffusion and specular channels. I have used two bump maps, the 
peeling paint image plus an alpha and a map for the scratches. A similar set of 
maps adorn the door frame, but they have been applied as cubic.

The wall uses two applications of fractal noise and a planar image map to achieve 
the mouldy old plaster look. a single unrelated bump map roughs up the surface.

The wall paper is similar to the wall however I have also used diffuse, specular 
and transparency maps to mess up the sharp edges produced by the clip map. 

Finally the floorboards, sigh... There are actually four types of floor board and 
each type has a slightly different set of the following; six colour maps, one 
diffuse map, five specular maps and three bump maps. The reason for all of this 
is to get the damp black mould falling off from the skirting board and the dust 
layer doing the same as well. Most of the textures needed alpha channels to limit 
the effect to particular parts of the object. several layers of fractal noise 
provide the grey dust layer. 

Most of the image maps I created by using multiple layers of fractal noise and 
rendering them in Lightwave at various sizes (e.g. 1200 x 200 for the skirting 
board peeling paint) I then touched them up (if necessary) in PhotoShop.

Finally the lighting. To get that dingy soft look I tried a couple of set-up's 
to get soft edged shadows. The first trick using motion blur and a spinning 
target doesn't work with spot lights. So I was forced to use area lights... 
(render time more than quadrupled to over 4 hours at 800 by 600). In order to 
light the spider better without affecting the rest of the scene It has been 
rendered separately and composited back in. The background shot has the spider 
in but it is unseen by the camera allowing its shadows to be kept. Depth of 
field adds the final polish.