XSI Base December Image Winner Congratulations Andreas! Congratulations to Andreas "Yayas" Kusumahadi from Indonesia, who has won the December XSI Base Image Contest. Andreas receives as a prize the Mesmer Press book XSI Illuminated: Character signed by the author, Anthony Rossano. About XSI Base Community (www.xsibase.com) and the Image Contest Every month XSI Base holds a contest about a creative topic. People can show their technical as well as their artistic skills. The artists who reach first, second or third place receive a prize. The new topic is always announced at the beginning of each month. Here's a link to the current Image Contest XSI Base.com is a Softimage community. Besides the forum, you can find the latest news about Softimage XSI, industry news, interviews with professionals from various industries, job openings, learning resources, tools and scripts. About Andreas Name: Andreas 'Yayas' Kusumahadi Email: yayas5150@hotmail.com Website: http://yayas.vze.com "I came to the CG industry in 1998 as an Art Director in an Advertising Agency in my home country, Indonesia. There I got a chance to use 3D Studio Max. A couple years later, when I moved to a studio, I started learning Softimage|3d and continued to use Softimage|XSI. The XSIBASE's December Contest 'Vision of the Past' might be abstract for some reason, but very open for imagination. My intention was to create something that could strongly bring us to the very past time. It was Jurassic Park that inspired me to make that fossil scene. Despite a very simple modelling work, I found that it's interesting to achieve such an old look, from defining the shader with RenderTree to rendering the final image. Thanks to XSIBASE's members for giving me suggestion in every progress. I came up with a simple Rhombicosidodecahedron mesh, then scaled it up in X axis to get a football-shaped mesh. In Geometry Approximation PPG, Discontinuity Angle was set to 12 to get sharp faces, and then randomized in all 3-axes to add some irregularity. The second mesh is a simple solid bowl from a revolved curve, then randomized in 3-axis as well. Since both models were so simple, displacement was used to get such details. The first mesh was displaced by vein shader, while the second one by cell shader. For displacement, I used Length/Distance/Angle instead of Parametric method. I left Max Displacement, Length, and Distant values as is, than slided the Angle up to 25, with Min recursive Steps: 1 and Max: 5. Translucency was used for the transparent mesh. Diffuse and Ambient colors were blended with a concrete image (Mode: Hard Light). Here the RenderTree shots: I used almost default render settings with a high anti-alias (0,3) and added a low-res caustic to speed up render time."