The theme
being this simple looking knot,
which was quite a headache to get right.
I varied it according to my representations of "The four elements".
Air was the first. It used to be the simplest until I started
messing around with refraction. I did the refraction in Photoshop with the
use of an opacity map for the distortion of the background. The distortion
isn´t quite correct, but as long as it looks good...
Then came
fire which took some time to get the
lighting right,
but was otherwise a straightforward modeling job. I like the atmosphere of
this picture (remark: this was done before DOOM)
Earth was harder, I used two texture maps with masks and
bump and shininess mapping to get the beanstalk right. The background was
rendered with procedural mapping for the distinction between "earth" and
stones".
Water was the trickiest picture to model and the
only one where
the knot and not the background represented the element.
I used multiple texture maps to simulate refraction, which works pretty well
if you don't look too closely.
cg.tuwien.ac.at
