Holy wood

Money doesn't grow on trees, it grows in them.

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It all started because everybody wanted to make sure to get a fair share. So the consensus decided to associate an arbitrary value to some minerals such as gold and natural gemstones. But since there were not much value to fulfill the needs of humanity, a brilliant idea popped up in one's mind: since it is already arbitrary, why not simply use some wood to print any value on a piece of paper?

There we are, living in an absurd system where everything depends upon printed bills. If you don't have some of them, you can die.

The original purpose was to ensure fairness, but it led to the exact opposite: mistrust. The resulting world has never had more injustice and unfairness. Everybody is rushing for Holy wood and would do anything for it including robbery, war, and murder.

Natural selection has been replaced by an artificial one, as evolution means progress through time, and now time means money.

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This picture is the ultimate attempt to right a wrong. There is a way.

We don't have to change our own mind, but our young or upcoming children can make their mind up. So let us just teach them the following rule: every human being is your natural sibling so give to everybody without waiting something in return.

The next generations will receive more than ever, not because they would work hard for it, but because everybody will give.

The almighty dollar is truly the evidence of man's ignorance as far as his place in nature is concerned. What are we doing devastating the nature we depend upon, polluting for even more profit?

The world must stop destroying itself for the quest of egocentricity only representing the misunderstanding of man's place in nature which should be one of friendship and empathy, that is a human one.

This shot took me much more time than expected. At first, I had to fix the tools for modeling the main tree because no free model was good enough for such a close-up. Then I updated my Macintosh system and my software was not working anymore! After the update, the graphic card used to crash when rendering the final (antialiased) version and a reboot was required each time! I had to reinstall everything on an external disk to make it work again.

The main trunk is made of B-Spline surfaces, and the money bill is CSG with a "100 Euro" texture on it. Some ambient occlusion was necessary for the gold coins lying in shadow. A leaf is simply an alpha-channeled texture applied on a flat rectangle. However the shadow of a leaf does not take the alpha into account. Fortunately the resulting squares are not obvious at all thanks to the soft shadow pass.

The various colors of the trees may suggest evolution of time, and also the different colors of the Euro bills.