Title: Close Encounter
Name: Willy Tschager

About this entry:
The image has been rendered with Bryce, my favorite program for this kind of job, because of the visual feedback when positioning camera and lights. To easy the color assignment in Bryce I separated the different colors into single LDR files by first inlineing the sub-files. The resulting files have been converted using Ldraw2LWS and LWS4Bryce. Ultimately all the green, brown, dark gray,... files were merged in Bryce by carefully grouping them into families.

Since the scene didn't cover the landscape format I duplicated the tree in the top right-hand corner and added a 32x32 baseplate. The colors you see are my custom Bryce colors matching the PovRay RGBs with exception to the trans-orange cone, which has been substituted by a glowing material. I also laid a texture on the girl's cloak.

The scene is lit by two lights. The main yellow light bulb is positioned just above the torch. The second light is the blue spot shadowed by a unicorn matte. The matte is a black'n'white LDView rendering of the LEGO horse with a 4-4con0.dat in the front.

Finally I added approximately 400 snowflakes, which are nothing more that spheres with a cloud surface. Last but not least I added a Bryce terrain simulating a layer of ground fog. 50 renders later it took more that 17 hours to calculate the final image with super anti-aliasing turned on.

The main effort got into the positioning of the unicorn spot and the search for the right snowflake and fog materials.

Because the final Bryce file weights more than 33 MB I didn't upload it to the site. Please contact me if you wanna have a look.