Ringclimber - Arsia Mons Team Photo

6/30/04

Finalized and posted during the Cassini Saturn Probe orbital insertion burn, 6/30/04-7/1/04 (12:11 AM ESDT). The main engine has just shut down.

One of the key events in Ringclimber is the first assembly of the team that will later successfully cross the Rings of Saturn. That event is the Triplanetary Arsia Mons Expedition, begun on January 12, 2215. Its three planets are Earth (Sharon Lazlo and Erin Goldstein-MacReady), Mars (Anne Lambert) and the Belt (Pat Yan).

This image combines four versions of the DAZ3D Victoria 3 model in Poser with the DAZ3D hi-resolution skin map, several different hair styles including the DAZ3D Layered Flip (Sharon), the Blond Whisper hair from hmann (with a dark hair map for Erin), the DAZ3D UpDo (Anne) and Michael Lane's Short Curls Hair (with a custom map for blond, created by the artist). Blackhearted's BlackEyes are used for all of the characters, with various eye maps including the Hi-Res Victoria standard eyes and Mindvision's ActualEyes.

Each face took about 2 days to complete. As each one was individually finished, it was added to the ensemble to ensure that all figures had equal realism and distinctive character.

Once the characters were complete, the image was rendered at 2048 pixels across using the Poser 4 rendering engine in Poser 5 (the Firefly rendering engine looked like it would run for a day and produce not especially better results, while the standard Poser engine completed the rendering in under 10 minutes on a 2GHz Pentium IV with 2Gb of RAM).