Journey to the Tips
“The Tips was a strange world of its own, the vegetable kingdom at its most imperial and most exotic. Here grew the burnurn plant, which Lily-yo sought for the soul of Clat. Pushing and climbing, the two women finally emerged on to one of these platforms. They took shelter from the perils of the sky under a great leaf. Above them, paralyzing half the heaven, burned the great sun…”
From “Hothouse” by Brian Aldiss © 1962
Technical aspects: Xfrog 3.5 was used to create the burnurn plant and the other plants. Rhino3D was used to create the main supporting branch and UVMapper Professional created the UV map and a digital camera was used to capture the texture and the bump map of the bark from an local thorn tree. Poser 4.01 was used to pose and create the human figures. The same custom texture maps for “Suckerbird ambush” were used for the these figures.
Everything was combined and rendered in Bryce, using a custom Sky Lab setting and only two parallel cylindrical volumetric lights. The file size was over 341Mb big and I had to increase the system RAM from 512Mb to 1Gb on my work machine just to render the final image. Without the extra RAM the image would have taken over 192 hours to render. It took only 14 hours with the extra RAM!
Apart from a bit of post-production work in Corel PhotoPaint 10 on correcting the figure joints and some volumetric light artifacts and the title, the rendered image is as Bryce rendered it.