The longing

“The cold desert night has descended and the time has come to retreat to the high wind-eroded sandstone bluff for long hours of meditation with the first moon as her only companion. Deep inside there is a longing, a tie to a forgotten past, now brought to remembrance by the rescue of the injured spacefarer…”

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Technical aspects: The response and encouragement I got from my first picture in the series, “Desert Rescue” was tremendous and I was inspired to do this picture. A realistic wide expanse of dunes was difficult to create but I drew on my own experiences of the dunes of the Namib Desert and with a little help from KPT Texture Explorer and my own texture altitude map I was able to get it to look just like it should. The lighting was also a really tough one to perfect. Moonlight scenes in Bryce 4 seem to lack the icy crispness and clear lighting of a real moonlit night in the desert, but the final results are quite satisfactory.

My wife posed for me, so I could get a natural feeling to the heroine’s posture. A number of sketches formed the basis for the final Poser 3 figure, which was then imported into Bryce 4. The high sandstone pinnacle is a symmetrical lattice. The lamp is a Boolean primitive with a volumetric light. The rifle and accessories from the original “Desert Rescue” figure set.

The moon was rendered as a separate Bryce scene and then composited using Corel PhotoPaint 8 to prevent the distortion of the moon’s image by the wide angle lens that I used to create the scene. Other post-production effect like the hair and anatomical corrections done with Corel PhotoPaint 8.

Worlds in the Making