11/2/00
This image is an illustration of the opening scene from my novel in progress - Source. It was created with Carrara (the background) and Poser (all figures).
"No! No! What are you doing?" Clu Sherril yells from the hangar balcony. The workers on the factory floor below look up. One rolls his eyes. "Great, " he mutters. "What'd we do now?"
The huge metal paned framework of the space vehicle looms above Clu as she hurries down the steps onto the brightly lit floor. There are pipes, fittings, and containers everywhere, but she moves past them nimbly, eyes on the huge plate being raised to a location near the top rear of the hull. She wears a white lab coat over a dark dress that matches the thick hood of her hair. Her eyebrows are too thick, and her face is a bit too angular and angry to be beautiful, but her eyes are crisp with the vitality of intellect.
She strides up to the lifter boss and gestures with a slashing motion of her narrow hand. The plate hangs in the air beyond, swaying slightly on the cables. "Who said you were supposed to do this?" she demands icily, eyes flicking across each of the workers in turn.
"Britton was down earlier," the lifter boss replies.
"San, you listened to Britton? I thought you knew better."
"Clu, he's the Directorate rep."
"He's a political idiot. That plate failed N ray testing last week, and the vacuum weld group doesn't have it scheduled for another two days. Bring it down."
The lifter boss sighs, and presses against the side of his headset. "Put the E39 Baker back into the pending bay, Sten."
She hears the mutter of voices and the sound of the lift slowly starting to shift the plate back across the floor. The workers disperse, except for the lifter boss, who hesitates, halfway between one step and the next. "Clu, uh... you'll deal with Britton on this?"
Her narrow face seems to sharpen with faint bitterness. "Yeah, I'll take care of it.
As a Carrara scene, it is my largest and most complex to date: 2518 objects, 20 lights, 81 master objects and 95 shaders. A large part of the object count are the elements of the latticework towers and the overhead crane. The image was rendered at 1600 x 1200 and then half sized for Poser (to improve the anti-aliasing); the Carrara rendering took over an hour and intersected over 2 million facets. Fortunately the Anything Glows "Master Lights" feature made management of the lights relatively easy.
Many custom shaders were used, based on products that included Tiles and Bricks from Digital Carvers Guild (the ceiling, brick wall, the surface of the Zadar). Custom shaders were created for everything else.
Most of the objects in the scene were custom modeled. The Zadar was originally modeled for Escape of The Zadar. The opening into the Zadar was created with a layers list rectangle of transparency, and reuses (with a gold version of the Telstar shader I created for the hull) the terrain shown between the engines of the Zadar. The plate uses a variant of the Telstar shader called Bone Telstar.
The hangar itself was a complex model. To allow for separate shading of the roof and floor, I copied and pasted the original spline model and removed everything but the desired part, and then shifted each part slightly downward and upward respectively. This strategy ensured a complete and near perfect fit.
One of the powerful capabilities of 3D graphics is reuse, and I was able to reuse the Zadar and the figure of Clu Sherril (originally developed for First Sight of Prometheus). The lifter boss was created for this image and uses Paul Leatham's excellent Subhash Skin from Renderosity's Poser Textures section.