Information Page
On this page you'll find some background on the pictures and some information on how they were made.
This was an IRTC entry which came 15th. The rock is a Julia Fractel and the figure composed of 20,000 spheres and cylinders. The sphere represent the Four Elements, Earth, water, fire and air. The most difficult part of this picture was the texturing of the ground and I eventually used a bump map of bubbles!
I've included this for the cloud effects! created with media. Unfortunately I've mislaid the code and only vaguely remember how they were done. The secret as I remember was the use of the frequency keyword. The balloon uses an isosurface normal but the ambient setting is too high. The gondola is simple CSG but could do with some more work and perhaps some tiny people.
This was yet another IRTC entry, it gave me a lot of trouble from the fog to the wings on the dragonflies. The dragonfly wings are simple HFs. One day I will get round to add hand coded bicubic patches to the wings with an iridescent, semi transparent texture. If I'm feeling really bored I might also get round to adding some wings and feelers to the dragonflies.
I've been haunted by this image for years and finally got round to doing it. It was done in Vue d,esprit one day I'm going to to it in POV and get a better ground texture with puddles etc.
I've always loved Eagles and when zygote made one available for Poser I just had to have it. This picture was the result! The skeleton also came from Poser but the wings are based on some dragon wings I made years ago - all hand coded bicubic patches. The snow was a pain to texture and suffers here from jpg compression.
The rocks were created in Amorphium, the tree is made with Gilles Tran's excellent maketree macro, the flowers are from Plant studio and the eagle is from Zygote. The grass I made(about time I coded some things for myself rather than using everybody elses work!)
The beginning of an attempt to create another world with a group of others but it came to naught I'm afraid. I may well do other pictures on this theme though.The world was very old and the land has been eroded away to form a maze of islands and tortured land masses. The towers represent land marks, lighthouses etc. In the original design there were to be bridges, platforms, balconies and more variety in the size and shape of the towers.
Another IRTC entry based on the theme of Nature. I tried to give the impression of the fecundity of nature of an alien ecology - Nature tooth and claw. Everything is modeled with POV primitives mainly by hand but I did use lparser for the crab like creatures.
My first attempt with isosurfaces. I spent a long time trying to match the iso pigment to the isosurface but couldn't do it. The creature was modeled with bioform.
The sky came first, then the parched ground and finally the tree. A few miniutes contemplation and I added the fog. It still needed something and prompted to do something worthwhile with Poser I added the figures. At this time I had not come by UV mapping in POV so I created some simple textures on the figures.
The harvest seemed to need a sequel and this was it. Still motivated to explore Poser further, I started playing with expressions and came up with this rather sad and lost child.
Inspired by a comment of Uncle Ken's I started to explore Leveller, in particular the fact that it exports height data for HFs. The rocks are placed using this facility and I added some grass rendertime was two hours. I was particularly pleased with the ground texture which used normal maps.
Inspired by a quote from John Dunne: "We're all awash in a sea of blood nd the least we can do is wave to one another." When I first came across this I thought, Like hell! we're more like to drown one another. A dream brought back memories of the quote and my reaction to it and gave birth to this picture.
My cats spend most of their lives sitting in the window watching the world go by - enough said.
Again this was part of the waterworld project - I decided I needed a boat and made this one. It's all CSG apart from the gunnells which are sphere-sweeps. The figure was my first use of Poser.
We used to do this as kids.
My first IRTC entry - I wanted to do something with an ethnic feel. I learnt a lot about CSG and POV in the process of creating this picture. Not least hours spent reverse engineering Chris Colfax's Galaxy include file for some of the sky effects.
A companion to evensong
Inspired by the sky
I spent a long time trying to crack the problem of portraying a rough sea. The name comes from the fact that one of the rocks looked like a cowled figure so I made some cowls in organica and added them to the other rocks.
This started as a lake but I decided it was better without the water!
Created in elastic by Pete Hamar. This is a powerful program with some unique features.
An experiment with isosurfaces. It began as a study of an estuary and became this shattered landscape.
Pirates was the result of experimentaion with Kevin Wampler's cloud code. The shape in the middle is media and the rest sort of followed. The Raft is CSG and the trunk was found on the net.
The Last Dawn on the Last Day of time was an unressistable title. The picture was the product of experimentation with media mist. The tree is from Gilles Tran's tree macro.
Ghost of dead warriors was an IRTC entry which came 6th my highest placing to date. The rocks are isosurfaces, image maps mapped onto spheres and the sky is media. The eagles curtesy of Zygote and Poser.
Portal speaks for itself. My one and only excursion into sci-fi.
Ray of hope is my IRTC entry for the Sea round. I had to render this on in two halves to keep the render time under months.
Another IRTC entry. More experiments with grass and mist.
Stones grew out of experiments with rendering very large numbers of objects, there are 10,000000 blades of grass in this picture!
My Second IRTC win based on the theme of Fantasy
A commission for a book cover. Lots of post work in this picture. The dress was my first attempt at modelling clothes in Rhino.
I was looking for an unusual entry for the War round of the IRTC. When the bombing of the Trade Center took place on Sept 11th I decided not to enter and finished this later.
A cold Red Kite - my first serious attempt at modeling a bird. The bird was modeled in Hamarpatch and a photo was abused to create the texture in CorelPaint.
This was going to be part of a much larger picture but when I saw the cloud this idea occurred to me.