The Hunt Illustration

4/8/2007

In 2007, I prepared The Hunt for print publication. The prep included some minor rewriting, and a new illustration.

This is not an actual scene from the book, but it probably happens shortly after the second landing on Tlnou.

I used Carrara for the sky, landscape and the shuttle, and Poser (with DAZ 3D Michael 3 figure and the Mandingo skin texture, plus the Uzilite MOS Invader suit and accessories, all with custom shading). The intent was to create the look and feel of a hot summer day out in the open grassland. The trees were placed with the automated help of the Carrara surface replicator, driven by a cellular shader and the grass was placed with the help of the Anything Grows grass / hair generator. The landscape contains 16,000 trees with probably around two million leaves, and there are about two million grass blades on the ground. It took about three days to complete the design.

The original illustration had been created in the late 1980s using an Amiga, the Imagine raytracing software and a figure called Humanoid, which I altered signfiicantly to create the native.

At that time, only the figure and the shuttle were modeled in Imagine. It took many many hours to render each of these relatively simple models. The grass was taken from a photo of cornstalks that I had made in Ellington, CT, and they were tinted to match the red needed for the illustration. The resulting image was used as a brush and repeated with variatioins to create both the foreground and background grasses. The sky was also a photograph that had been retinted to match the sky of Tanith.

The 21st century is a different world. Everything in the new image is modeled in 3D, though the figure and the background are composited, since two different programs were used for each. And it took minutes to render on my Sony Vaio laptop.