Helen of Troy – The Second Act

Homer’s “Iliad and Odyssey” have always been one of my favorite stories from my childhood. The character of Helen of Troy has always fascinated me. Hollywood prefers blondes, but neither Helen Kruger or Sienna Guillory did it for me. Anne Hathaway would have done a better job.

This is my second attempt to do honor to my personal fantasy! Helen ascending the steps of a Greek/Trojan/Minoan castle looking somewhat surprised at meeting…Paris, Menelaus, the invading Greeks…whatever!

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Technical aspects: Poser 7 was used to turn DAZ3D’s Victoria 4 into Helen, with some photo reference of my favorite actress at the moment, Anne Hathaway, I used the Victoria 4.2 Morphs++ to get Helen looking more like Anne and with a little help from Hexagon. Christine Hair was used as well as Modern Muses Snow, to get the final look and pose.

Enter the demo version of Marvelous Designer 2 which allowed me to create realistic clothing for Helen like no other program has done before! This program blows the Poser Cloth Room simulator out of the water, for realism and ease of use!

MD2 was able to create the look and feel of a typical Mediterranean costume which was then exported as a OBJ file and imported into Poser.

did a bit of research on Greek architecture and opted rather to for a Minoan look to the building. I based the architecture on the Knossos Palace in Crete – the pottery torch holders too. Hexagon was used to create the environment.

My copy of Vue 9 – still a very new, and frightening alternative to Bryce 7 – (which I still consider an “unfinished” Beta software) was used to import the Poser file and the Hexagon environment and then lit with some of the lighting tools of Vue 9. The final render took 56 hours on my Core Duo-based Windows 7 64-bit system, but it was a full “global radiosity” atmospheric model after all and the software is 64-bit capable and can use both my CPU cores – unlike Bryce 7.

The final render was then brought into Corel Photopaint X5 and some minor level adjustments and boosting of detail was applied here and there. Very little else was done!

Worlds in the Making