6/18/00
My most complex work to date, this took several weeks of work using Carrara and Poser. It illustrates a scene from my novel-in-progress "Source"...
They step out onto a nighttime patio with discreet lighting and plants everywhere. It is a display of wealth that momentarily amazes Clu - but in a second her attention is seized by the view.
Beyond the edge of the patio are the trees like towering lace and veins. Above them, for a moment she thinks she is seeing the stars, until something odd about the geometry strikes through her general astonishment. Then she realizes that she is not looking at a sky, but at a vastly curving plane of earth, softly crusted with millions of lights that align into fractal but almost euclidean systems as they climb up the curve of the sky, dimming with the vast distance, and then sharpening again as they rise higher and curve over like an endlessly breaking wave. A sudden dizziness strikes her, and she is terrified of falling into the sky, or of tripping over the edge of the patio and falling away over the trees into a distant city.
Luke's hand is on her shoulder, steadying her. "What's the matter?" he asks.
"Don't tell me you're used to it?" she asks, gesturing weakly. He looks puzzled... then relieved. He laughs. "Guess I am. I was born here, after all. Never lived on the outside of anything."
She holds onto the railing and carefully cranes her neck to look upward. Behind her, the night shades into day, and she can see the daylit landscape running down toward the house, only to disappear dimly into the night. There are clouds wrinkling the distant sky. "I wonder if it's a good idea to eat out here."
Celine is behind them at the table, laying out plates and trays. "Why?"
Luke speaks up for her, "She's having a bit of vertigo, I think." He helps Celine with the tableware, and the sound is calming, normal.
"That would be it," Clu whispers.
This is actually three separate renderings - the first is the cylinder of Prometheus, mapped with an orbital photograph over 30Mb in size, with the suntube at its center; the second is the very complex house, with all of its lighting, trees, and the two Poser figures just outside the windows, with the first rendering as background and backdrop; the final rendering uses Poser to render the figure of Clu against a background image that is the second rendering.
Models are from the Carrara standard model set, from 3D Cafe, or were created by the author (the house), sometimes using tools such as Tree Druid and Tree Druid Standalone (the Thark tree on the patio). Textures were from the standard set, from samples available at Hawkin-Z GraF-X, or were developed by the author (cantilever marble texture, reddish pillar texture, tree textures). The light sources in the house use Eric Winemiller's "Anything Glows" area light extension for Carrara. The character of Clu Sherril is a P4 Nude Woman with an extensively modified face, textured with Anton's P4 Helena, hair from Confusius Morphhair 3, wearing the P4 Woman's T-Shirt and Unitard, and with excellent forearm bump maps from Dan Wilmes. The T-shirt is mapped with a thumbnail of my abstract picture "Bornean Foliage". Post-production consisted of modifications to the elbow joint imaging, eliminating an interpenetration of the back hair and the shirt, and blurring the intersection angle of the house glass, and was performed with Photostyler, using pantograph and blurring.
Because this home is constructed according to the features of Prometheus as discussed in Source, there are
- No books or bookshelves (direct access to libraries through contact lens displays).
- No entertainment systems (same as above, audio through translation support).
- Architectural features constructed seamlessly from unusual materials.
- Seamless perfectly flat glass.
- No drapes (ability to polarize and reflectize sections of glass).
- A combination of plant life similar to that on earth and also more alien (such as the Thark tree).