Gentoo Kung Fu

March 2005

Gentoo penguins are the largest type of stiff-tailed penguins (which includes the King penguin, I believe). They also happen to know kung fu. At least mine does and will not hesitate to beat down any unwelcome assailants. I got the idea after seeing a picture of a bunch of Gentoos sliding down a hill and thought they'd be pretty cool to sort of personify. The original idea was an army of lightsabre wielding penguins but that changed when I found I couldn't make them hold the sabre without properly modelled hands. This scene is done in LightWave 7 and is simply a reflective ground plane with Ripples textures referenced to every point where the characters touched the ground. A gradient applied to the reflection and diffuse channel provides the smooth transition to white toward the horizon. A plane with another gradient (this time, Z-zxis distance) placed right in front of the camera creates the transition to grey up top. There are no shadows in this scene; the SG Ambient Occlusion Shader was used for the shading. All characters are subdivision surfaces and the penguin is UV mapped. Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten the hang of UV mapping and the texture exhibited pinching and seaming on the model, which I edited out using the GIMP. I like this picture; it's a little different from what I usually do.