'Species'
I wanted this render to look like artwork from a reference book on plants. You know the sort of thing, a single specimen, perfectly drawn and painted by a specialist. Whether I've succeeded I leave you to judge.
This one really stretched things, not only for my Amiga, but for LightWave itself. I constructed the leaves (6 variations, double-sided), the flowers (4 variations) each with double-sided petals, the stalk, the buds, etc., and when they were all fitted together, the 'Specimen' contained more Points than the 65,536 LightWave5 allows for a single Object. I was about two-hundred over and the system rejected the Object! Luckily, each bud contains 'hidden' anthers and a stamen, which are only needed for the animation. The buds 'open' up you see. So, any buds not opening don't need their internal organs. Deleting these from a single bud pulled things into line.
The second snag came when I actually tried to run the render. So much RAM was taken up by the 'Specimen' object, there was insufficient to run LightWave's internal buffers. This meant reducing the 40Mb I usually allocate to the job. With 30Mb available, the render proceded OK, but even then, in two slices. LightWave will run virtually any size of scene providing you allow sufficient free RAM for the buffers. In some cases, this may mean rendering the scene in wafer-thin slices, but one way or another, LightWave is a very forgiving piece of software.
This render uses LightWave's 17-pass Highest grade antialiasing. 'Course that's only for this still, the animation would never get done at 20 minutes per frame!
