2/14/01
The first part of the Expedition diptych, adding to its meaning as described on that page.
This is an image that attempts, within that context, to capture my emotions on the abstraction of climbing, after a recent trip outside to climb at East Peak in Connecticut after a snowfall. Cliffs like buildings, the rich textures of the outdoors, the crisp sunlight, the sense of scale.
The landscape was created and rendered with Bryce. Corel Photo Paint was used to create the terrains. The foreground terrain used one of the Texture File Library elements - "Aerial Photography" under the "Styles" library. The background terrain was a rectangular-fill painted "skyscraper blocks" terrain that was darkened at the edges in a square pattern. That produced the pyramid look.
Naturally, the most time in the Bryce phase was taken on material development. The material for the cliffs was fairly straightforward and made from scratch. But the foreground used the mud and snow preset to start with. The mud part was not, however, suitable for the complex and distant looking cliff texture I needed. So significant fiddling with the scale and nature of the procedural textures were needed before it was acceptably real.
The figures were created in Poser, with the Bryce image as a backdrop. The foreground figure is based on the Poser 4 Amane character, and uses the paulskin of Paul Letham. The shirt is a men's turtleneck with a texture from Beatone, with some touchup to improve the seams and the collar. In this phase, the most difficult part was working to find a face that would render an expression well with so small a number of pixels to work with.
Relatively small amounts of touchup were done. There is a small patch of snow in shadow that was eliminated and another that was darkened. Reflections were added to the eyes.
The image took about 18 hours to create.