Lost Angeles

Member : rmcgregor

Image description
Throughout most of the 21st century the undisputed champion of motion picture entertainment continued to be the Hollywood machine. Taken exactly forty years after the Great Western Quake of 2081, this photograph commemorates the last days of this decaying monument to the former glory of a city that was lost, without warning, beneath the waves of the Pacific.

Here stands the last remnant of that lost piece of entertainment history they called Hollywood, a crumbling monument to the millions of live lost here in those tragic days.

Description of how this image was created
The island in the foreground started as a simple cube in Wings 3D. After a few cuts and connects, some scaling, stretching, deforming, tweaking and smoothing I had a nice base mesh. I played around with the mesh-deformation macros, but ended up taking the base mesh into ZBrush for sculpting some rocky details and ended up with a hi-res mesh of 1.2 million triangles. I used a complex layered texture to give a lot of color detail to the landscape.

The trees are simple mesh objects modeled in Wings 3D and Dryad. I'm just using simple procedural textures on all the plants. All mesh models were converted to POV-Ray mesh2 format using PoseRay.

The Hollywood sign is a group of height_field objects all arranged just so, with a couple of different rusty bump/image maps for the letters and supports. I eroded the edges of the letters and added some holes by erasing into the outlines of the height_field source bitmaps using a Wacom tablet.

The seaweed on the shoreline and in the foreground water is a set of a few hundred height_fields randomly scattered around with a bozo pattern, each positioned via trace() onto the water/shore. Several hundred bits of height_field trash, etc were scattered along the shoreline in the same way.

The background water is just a large flat box, and the background mountains are just more textured height_fields. The sky is an averaged texture that combines portions of three large-scale media cloud renderings projected onto a background billboard plane. The birds are very simple blobs positioned randomly in the sky.

A single area light provides the specular and shadows, global illumination is provided by an HDR probe (converted to type 1 mapping with Ive's awesome program IC) and radiosity.

Photoshop for contrast correction and signature/text overlay.

General statistics
No of ratings	:	13
Min. overall rating	:	30 (10 / 10 / 10)
Max. overall rating	:	60 (20 / 20 / 20)
Sum of rating	:	572 / 780
Date uploaded	:	2009-04-15 01:05:23

Specific details Note: The maximum value below is misleading as the voting system has changed. If the member votes for all the entries and has created one him/herself, there is an automatic 20/20/20 score added to the value (This encourages all members who enter to vote).
Rating type	:	Min : Max : Sum : Out of
Artistic	:	10 : 20 : 180 : 260
Concept	:	10 : 20 : 187 : 260
Technical	:	10 : 20 : 205 : 260
Overall	:	30 : 60 : 572 : 780

Comments by members when rating this image

1.   29-04-2009 "Unfortunately", RMG is back!.. Holy mood :-) 2.   25-04-2009 Loved this. Great idea. 3.   21-04-2009 Very nice image. I love it. 4.   18-04-2009 Great water, and very high tech quality overall. But we all know that *you* can do better! The rusty metal doesn't really convince, and on overall the picture looks rather flat, as if shot through an extreme zoom lens. 5.   17-04-2009 background is almost photorealisitc foreground is more unnatural