ALIENWARE Challenge 2004
Taming the Bugbears
Liu Wei (Eatbug), 2 March 2004

Hot in second place for the Alienware Challenge 2004 is Liu Wei, 26 year old visual effects artist at Sega in Shanghai, China. His image won Wei a NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000 professional workstation card sponsored by PNY Technologies. Wei writes about how he created the "Bugbears"

When I had found out about the Alienware Challenge on CGNetworks, it seemed too late, as there were only 12 days to go. I was really excited about the topic so I jumped right in. My philosophy is to use simplicity to convey a sense of something much larger. There is an adage in China that it you see the spot of a leopard, you know that it’s a leopard. Similarly, I wanted my piece to be simple, yet give viewers the impression that it was part of something much larger.

Concept/Modeling
The concept I had was to have a ‘bugbear’ with ‘feelers’ (tentacles) on them. I started by modeling the main body of the bugbear, and created random curves from it. Once I was happy with the placement of the curves, I changed the curves to soft bodies and added a field to affect them. In order to give the impression of a bugbear with lots of tentacles, I just kept duplicating the curves. I then duplicated the entire bugbear and joined the two. Initially I wanted to join the bugbears with a DNA helix, but decided against it, as it didn’t look “alien“. Instead I had particles flowing between the two bugbears to give the impression that they were joined in some way. The background was really rather simple, as I wanted a speedy render. It is very basic geometry and a detailed displacement map.

The bugbear model renders in their original color.

Texturing
The material of the bugbear was created using layered shaders. One shader is a special specular shader with a bump map and the main shader has color and bump maps. Finally, another shader is layered to add glow.
For the background, I used a noise bump/displacement map. The problem with this was when I rendered the image at the full size required for the challenge (over 2k), and the results were horrible, as the maps didn’t hold up. I spent a bit of time tweaking the maps for the final render.