This is my entry for a Monthly Modeling Contest. The theme is Laboratory – Place of Modern Miracles.

My entry is about a bacteria, Clostridium Sapiens, created to store information in tiny structures in its cells for very small computers. The bacteria unexpectedly develops intelligence and builds a civilization.

They open the Petri dish and get out. The jack tower lifted the lid and the winch pulled it back. Then they built a bridge. The glass and flask contents were challenging. With all the transparent and reflective objects this takes an hour to render the final picture.

Later I made markings for the flasks and made a new render with the markings and raycast instead of scanline rendering. Raycast made the glass look better but isn’t as sharp for the details.

Here is a flask with markings, the marking texture and the raycast render. The flask has a two layer texture. The first layer is the glass and the second has the markings. The marking texture acts as a transparency mask making the letters opaque and the rest transparent to show the glass there. The marking color is just the color of the second layer so it is easy to change. The mask has a lot of white space so it can be moved and scaled to fit the flask.

I made a few simple buildings for the cities and place copies of them with the geometry paint tool. It sprays copies onto the surface of the selected object (the agar cylinder) as you move the mouse. Here are wire frames of the buildings and of the bacteria’s large machines and bridge.

Software: trueSpace 7.6 model side with Lightworks render. Paint Shop Pro for textures.